


Changing Times

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: All of the Viruses, Body Horror, Complete, F/M, Gift Work, I swear it has a plot, Infected Characters, Other, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 04:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11372373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Alex Wesker is dead, but her goals live on, twisting and being twisted by the young mind of Natalia Korda, becoming something far more horrific than one might have imagined. What will this mean for our heroes and the rest of humanity?





	1. It Begins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fullysowerewolf](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fullysowerewolf).



> Written as a request from fullysowerewolf, a male version of my earlier fic Everything Changes.

Natalia Korda stared out the window of the car, watching endless miles of open desert pass by. It was lovely is a desolate sort of way. Barry was in the driver’s seat, sweating despite having the AC running full blast. She couldn’t blame him for being anxious, it had been an hour since they’d passed another car after the last turn they’d taken, as per the directions given by her phone. A road trip the two of them were taking to look at different colleges. Barry didn’t understand why she wanted to look at a school all the way out in Arizona, but he’d agreed that it would make for an interesting trip for the two of them, father daughter time before she was grown up and left the house like her ‘sisters’.

Moira and Polly, having already gotten through college themselves had given her plenty of advice, all of which she ignored. Their advice, well-meaning as it had been, had grown tiresome far too quickly for her to have confidence in her ability to feign caring. She’d known from the start what she’d wanted to do, which was to help people as a researcher of some sort, coming up with cures for things she carefully avoided going into detail about. It was a deliberately vague half-truth that she repeated again and again until it took on a life of its own. Kathy accepted it without question, proud of her for wanting to ‘pay it forward’, a quaint and somehow fitting notion of hers. Natalia fully intended to pay forward what had been done for her, to her. Moira, missing the point, wanted to know why she wanted to be a doctor and suffer through medical school. Polly kept insisting that she’d make a great teacher.

Barry at least had asked her why she wanted to be a scientist, as though he was worried about what the answer might have been.

The funny thing was, Barry was right to be worried. Her motivations weren’t entirely innocent, her interests far from academic. The memories of Alex Wesker had influenced her, the thoughts and goals of a grown woman far stronger than the mind of a young girl. She’d been old before her time, at least mentally, and her body had finally reached the point where it could meet her ambitions. Her own ambitions, not those of Alex Wesker, though there were places where they lined up. She was her own person now, an inextricable tangle of Alex and Natalia, but she’d made it work, especially with the resources and knowledge Alex had provided her. She had a remarkable understanding of bioengineering and genetics, as well as the money to back it up. Alex had been ready for her rebirth, millions of dollars stashed in countless accounts across the globe and for years Natalia had been skimming off of them, investing some, making purchases with the rest, watching her money and acquisitions grow. From a distance of course, she had to maintain the appearance of an innocent, tragic little girl.

But now that was about to end.

“It’s going to be okay,” Barry spoke out of nowhere, misunderstanding her anxiety.

It wasn’t because they were lost, to the contrary, she knew exactly where they were and where they were going. She was anxious in the manner of a child on Christmas Eve, excited for what she knew would soon come, but a fearful worm of doubt still chewing at the back of her mind. What if things went wrong? Could they still go wrong at this late a junction?

No, they couldn’t. She glanced at her phone, the directions she had carefully programed in. Three more miles, less than three minutes at the speed Barry was going, and they’d be taking one last turn, one from which there would be no going back for either of them.

She’d bought herself a bit of land out in the middle of a sort of no man’s land between two Indian reservations. There was nothing on it of consequence, just a few square miles of cartographical oddity. No one claimed it and it was too far out of the way to mean anything to anyone. The tribes in the area weren’t even interested in laying claim to it, it was that utterly valueless, which made it priceless to her.

Two miles now and they’d be turning onto a road that was barely a road, little more than a set of wheel ruts left from when she’d had the facility built on the property. It had been done years ago, the project completed and then seemingly abandoned. Just last year she’d reopened it, silently and without fanfare. She’d found a few likeminded individuals who actually possessed the skills to manage what she needed, not that her standards had to be terribly exacting. All her employees needed to do was follow the instructions she gave them and regularly report progress. They thought of themselves as scientists, researchers, doctors even, but they were really little more than glorified maintenance workers as far as she was concerned, tending to her lab and the projects it contained. They didn’t care though, they all knew what the goal of their work was and were delighted to be working towards it.

How many of them there were, that she’d been able to handpick individuals who were actually useful from the whole awful lot had terrified her at first.

It still terrified her.

A mile now.

“Hey dad,” the word nearly choked her, but she’d gotten better at hiding it over the years. It didn’t stick quite so badly in her throat, “There’s a turn coming up and it looks like it’ll take us some place.”

Barry nodded, “If it doesn’t we’ve still got enough gas to turn back and make it to that last town.”

It would be a two hour drive back to that town, which was what she’d been counting on, the sunk cost fallacy. They’d gone this far, better to press on into the unknown that they’d invested so much time heading into than turn back and make the long drive to where they knew where they were.

“Oh, there it is, but are you sure?” Barry slowed down as he caught sight of the dirt track, “It doesn’t look like much.”

“The map says there’s something a few miles down in,” Natalia reassured unnecessarily, he was already taking the turn, “The Sonoran Research Outpost is what the map says it is. Kind of funny, because I think this is actually the Chihuahuan Desert. Might be interesting to see what they do there, research the desert I guess, but it might be neat. Maybe they’ll give us a tour.”

Barry laughed at that. He’d bought her story of wanting to go to school in Arizona because of the desert, because the hot, dry, open spaces were so different from the miserable, nightmare memories of her youth. And there was a grain of truth to that, part of the reason why she hadn’t used one of the properties she already owned, or looked into a defunct Umbrella facility. Those would have been far easier, but the desert had an appeal that went beyond its isolation.

“Do you know what they do there?” It was a joking accusation, but an accusation none the less, “Is that why you told me to take the turn, so you could go on a tour of this place?”

She giggled, nervousness keeping it from becoming a knowing laugh.

A little farther on and the facility itself came into sight. The gatehouse, typically unmanned and abandoned looking had one of the researchers waiting in it, for their benefit. He looked hot and miserable, and when the car approached he waved at them, as though he’d been expecting to see them, which he had, Natalia had warned him of their impending arrival and instructed him to be ready.

Barry slowed the car down and rolled down the window, heat rolling into the car like a solid thing.

“I think we’re lost,” Barry openly admitted.

“I think you’re right,” the researcher laughed, “You look as miserable as I feel. Let me get you something to drink and then maybe you’d want to come inside and cool off for a bit before driving on? We don’t get many visitors out here.”

“I don’t know, we’re on a schedule,” Barry started, but the researcher was already handing him a soda the cooler he’d been keeping in the gatehouse.

Barry took it without question and drank half of it in a single gulp.

The tranquilizer that it had been spiked with was potent and he was unconscious before he even had the chance to realize that something was wrong.

She almost felt bad about what she’d done, dragging Barry into it all at such an early stage of things, but it was the only way.

One of the researchers would drive the car back out into the middle of nowhere, another following in a separate car to pick them up when they stopped to drain whatever gas was left in the tank. Then the car would be abandoned for someone to find and assume the worst, that the car had broken down and the two of them had wandered off into the desert in search of help. It was so easy for people to vanish in so much nothingness that the search wouldn’t go on for long and Natalia would be safe to begin her work.


	2. Barry

Barry groaned and rolled over. Stupid, crappy hotel beds, they wrecked his back, and driving for hours each day was hell on his knees. When they got back home he was going to need a vacation after his vacation looking at colleges with Natalia. It was worth it though, she was happier than he’d ever seen her. Something about the desert really seemed to click with her. He’d thought it was crazy that she’d wanted to go to school in Arizona, but she’d known what she’d wanted and maybe it would be for the best. She’d never had many friends in grade school, been quiet, almost depressed and anxious, but maybe the change of scenery would help and maybe she’d finally make some friends rather than spending all her time alone in her room, typing away at the computer.

If it worked out for her then it would be all worth it and when he and the girls went to visit they’d be going in by plane rather than taking a multi-day road trip, which would make things a lot easier. No risk of getting lost that way either, like they’d been…

He say up in the crappy hotel bed, only to realize that it wasn’t a crappy hotel bed, just a mattress on the floor.

Where was he?

The last thing he remembered was driving, lost in the middle of nowhere.

No, they’d made it to somewhere, but everything after that was a blur.

How had they made it back? Had they made it back?

He had to focus, but it was hard.

“You’re up!”

It was Natalia’s voice, something for him to focus on. She sounded frightened, or maybe relieved. It was hard to tell when just sitting up made the room spin. It was a good thing he was on the floor, otherwise he probably would have fallen over.

“You are awake,” Natalia repeated, sounding slightly more confident, “I was worried.”

“What happened?” he slurred. The room was dimly lit, but shapes were starting to come into focus. A vaguely Natalia shaped blur was sitting in front of him, lines running up and down, side to side across his vision.

“The idiot used carfentanil,” Natalia said angrily, “Not much, technically the dosage was almost correct, but the margin of error…”

He had no idea what any of that meant, if it was supposed to mean anything or if he was still half out of it.

“I didn’t think to stock any opioid antagonists, an oversight that could have…” she trailed off, shuddering, “Well, it’s something I’ll be correcting right away, especially since…”

“What happened?” Barry repeated, frustrated that he couldn’t make any sense of what Natalia was talking about even though she seemed to know what was going on.

“I’m sorry. I know you won’t believe me, but I really am,” she said quickly, “Without naloxone or naltrexone I had to make do with what we had on hand. It wasn’t what I would have wanted to do, but needs must when the devil drives.”

She fidgeted in her chair, leaned forward, her face slowly coming into focus as he squinted. She looked worried, but not the right kind of worried for what was going on, not that he knew what was going on in the first place. Something bad, that much he was sure of, but beyond that it was as much of a mystery as where they were.

“Natalia, please,” he rubbed at his temples, willing the headache to pass.

“Alright then, she stood up, wiped her hands on her pant legs and sat back down, “Time to stop pretending. I had them inject you with the G-virus, a modified strain though. It shouldn’t be quite as aggressive as what William Birkin infected himself with, at least I hope not, but it was the best thing I could think of. You’d stopped breathing, we’d resorted to mechanical ventilation, but long term that wasn’t viable. I couldn’t wait for the drug to wear off, so I decided that the G-virus, with its adaptability, had the best chance of helping you pull through. It worked, you started breathing on your own, but I wasn’t sure if you’d still be…you. So far things look promising, but…”

He could make sense of about half of that, but he wasn’t sure if the half he hadn’t gotten would make it better or worse. Fighting nausea he stood up and walked towards Natalia, the lines coming into focus as bars. He was in a cell.

Natalia was outside, talking about viruses. About him nearly dying and being infected with the G-virus. He’d heard of that one, where had he heard of it? What did it do? Not make zombies, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t be in the state he was in.

Another unknown.

Was he feeling the way he did because of the virus or because of what had happened to him. He’d been drugged, stopped breathing and Natalia had him infected to save his life.

She’d had him infected.

She was the one who’d brought them there.

“Why?” it was the only question that remained to be asked.

Natalia sighed, “I don’t expect you to understand, not yet at least, but I suppose I owe you an explanation. Firstly, my intention is not to hurt people, but to spare them from pain, to bring about an ultimate end to suffering in all forms. The problem is humanity, as it is now, is defined by fear and suffering. I managed to escape it by breaking free of the confines of mortality, but the means through which I escaped won’t work for everyone. That’s why I’m not a monster Barry, I want to save everyone, not a select few like Albert did, but all of humanity. I want change the entire species into something new, something far more capable of surviving. The Progenitor isn’t the key, not exactly, it’s more of a door and my research is devoted to finding that key, a way out, a way for all of humanity. When I’m done everyone will be ageless, immortal. They won’t be the same though and that’s the problem. There’s going to be an adjustment period and humanity or the new species, several species is my hope, for the sake of adaptability, that will be taking its place are going to need someone to look to. Barry, I’d been planning on making you one of the first of the final group rather than the first test subject. I hadn’t intended to use the G-virus on you. I’d been hoping to enhance the C-virus for you. It gives far better results, but I lacked the means of refining it. There might still be a chance for the rest of them, which is a good thing since I’m not sure how strongly the G-virus will affect you, mentally at least. Physically, it’s already…”

She shrugged and stared at him.

He stared back at her, recalling the fight against the monster that had been Alex Wesker. The thing had been anting, determined to kill Natalia, calling her fake, an imposter. At the time Barry had dismissed it her brain deteriorating as the virus consumed her body, but now…

“Who are you really?” He asked, standing up. Much to his surprise he was steady on his feet. His head still hurt, but it was more of a migraine than anything else, complete with the little flashes of light in front of his eyes.

Another shrug, “Natalia Korda, mostly. I have the memories of Alex Wesker, some of her ambitions, but my goal is entirely different. She was selfish, and while some of my plans are petty indulgences, ultimately it will work out for the betterment of humanity. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see about making plans for the arrival of our next guest.”

She got up and left without another word, pressing some button on the wall outside of his cell so that a thick pane of glass slid across it, muffling all sounds from outside.

o0o

Time had passed, Barry wasn’t sure how much since there was no pattern to when meals were brought and the lights were always kept at the same dim level. Any change was due to his eyes adjusting to the perpetual gloom, but there had been plenty of other changes.

At first they hadn’t been that horrific, the initial ones so subtle that he hadn’t noticed them until after things started getting bad.

Looking back, the first sign of what was happening was that, despite sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor, he wasn’t suffering from any of the aches and pains that he’d gotten used to, instead he woke up feeling refreshed. Sleeping on the floor in what amounted to a prison was the best sleep he’d gotten in years.

The other early changes had been similarly subtle and positive. He’d lost some weight, gained some muscle. The weight loss could be explained by eating less, the muscle though Natalia, or maybe Alex Wesker, he still wasn’t sure who or what she was, had explained during one of her visits. In an offhanded way she’d mentioned that muscular hypertrophy was a common side effect of Progenitor derived strains.

It wasn’t just his muscles that were growing though. He’d lost weight, but the clothing he’d been wearing when he was captured was too small for him. Yesterday he’d managed to tear his shirt badly enough that it was useless, not that it mattered. It might have been for the better even, due to the reason behind his headaches. An eye had opened on his back, somewhere below his left shoulder blade. He’d discovered it when he woke up one day and realized that part of his field of vision was a blur of gray. He’d checked his eyes, but there hadn’t been anything wrong with them, he hadn’t realized it until a second eye opened, this one on his left shoulder. He noticed it because it was somewhere he could see and once he saw it he made the connection with the one on his back.

The eyes, or at least the one on his shoulder, was small, not much larger than a normal human eye, and almost normal looking. The pupil was too large for the white and the iris was irregularly shaped, but it wasn’t inherently monstrous except for where it was.

If the eyes had been the end of it, it might not even have been that bad, not compared to some of the stuff he’d encountered in Raccoon City and afterwards, but there was more to it than the eyes and the growth.

His left arm had grown and gained muscle faster than his right and somewhere along the line things had started to go wrong. The bones didn’t line up right and his fingers, they’d fused and grown into wicked looking claws.

If he got out he’d be able to do some damage with his claws, after trying and failing to reason with Natalia, convince her that what she was doing was wrong his thoughts had turned to planning an escape. The problem was, even if he got out of his cell, he had no idea where he was in the building. Maybe he could fight his way out, but then he’d still be in the middle of the desert. He’d have to get out, find a vehicle and then what? Drive to the nearest town and get help?

The BSAA would come for sure, because something like him showing up in anywhere was bound to bring them in. Then the most he could hope for was that he’d get a chance to explain things, that they’d listen and believe.

So he was in a bad way, but at the same time he was still able to count his blessings, so far he hadn’t experienced any of the mental effects of the virus that Natalia had mentioned during one of her visits. When he thought of Polly and Moira all he felt was concern and dread, that Natalia planned to infect them and turn them into monsters as well.

And yet things could still be worse, he was still sane, still mentally himself, unlike the poor man in the cell across from him. Maybe he simply wasn’t able to cope as well, maybe it was whatever he was infected with destroying his mind, but with the soundproof glass preventing any possibility of conversation Barry couldn’t tell. Whatever the reason, his fellow prisoner was a reminder of how much worse his situation could have been.


	3. Ethan

Mia had said that the new facility he was being transferred to would help him, that they’d be able to try more radical treatments there to cure his infection and that in the meantime, since it was isolated enough, he’d be able to spend time each day outside.

It had sounded too good to be true and it turned out that it wasn’t just the mutamycete infection making him feel that way.

He’d gotten used to the bouts of paranoia, the occasional auditory hallucinations and was getting better at stopping himself when the urge towards self-harm rose up, but this was a case where the little voice in his head saying that it was a bad idea had been entirely him. Mia had seemed so optimistic about it that he hadn’t wanted to say no, especially when her phone rang outside his hospital room and she stepped into the bathroom for a quick, nervous talk. He hadn’t been able to overhear much of it, but from the sounds of it the company she had worked for was in serious trouble and that depending on how things went down she’d be in trouble as well, trouble that he might get dragged into thanks to his being infected. So going to the new facility was as much about getting him to safety as it was about whatever treatments they might offer.

She’d driven him there, cried when she left and then he’d been on his own, trying to pay attention to the pair of doctors that were leading him inside while ignoring the voice in his head suggesting that biting off the nose of the taller doctor would be funny, or maybe biting off one of his own fingers, just the tip, right at the first knuckle, his little finger would be best. It would crunch, there would be blood and if he did it right he’d be able to bite through the joint and swallow it. It was something he’d done before, back before the right balance of antipsychotic medicines had been found. His left thumb was growing back, slowly, proof that the mutamycete was still there. Hopefully the treatment wouldn’t kick in before it finished growing back, because as much as he wanted to be cured, he didn’t want to have a missing finger as a reminder of it.

Thinking about his thumb had been a mistake, strengthening the impulse. He stopped, took one of his pills and soon felt better, likely thanks to the placebo effect since none of the medications he was on actually worked that fast. He knew that half of what he was on probably didn’t help, but it was the thought that counted. Neither of the doctors had seemed alarmed when they guided him to a white room and asked him to undress in preparation for an examination. He’d done as told, because though he was concerned, they hadn’t given him any reason to think there was anything wrong with the situation.

Then the doctor arrived, the real doctor. That was what he thought of her as, the real doctor, even though he had come to the conclusion that she wasn’t really a doctor. It was more about reminding himself that she was real. She wasn’t a doctor, but she was real.

Pale, dark hair, wildly sad eyes, far too young to be running the place, but she was.

He’d thought she was a hallucination at first, until one of the doctors walked in and asked her a question and she responded. That proved that she was real and that the resemblance was all in his head. She wasn’t Eveline, an adult with the voice of a child, instead she was the opposite, a child with the tone and mannerisms of an adult.

She was the same as Eveline though, a monster, not that he knew it at the time.

The examination was normal enough at the start, a basic physical while she asked him about the medications he was on, a cocktail of antipsychotics, with a few antivirals and antifungals thrown in for good measure. He’d memorized the list of them like a mantra before the trip, just in case he was asked about them, or even worse, ran out and had to ask for more.

She paid special attention to his thumb and the other fading scars, asking him about how they were healing, if the process was slowing down or speeding up.

A good question. Healing was bad in his case, injuries lingering good. Everything was backwards and upside down.

He laughed at the thought, but only in his head and the laughter kept up long after he stopped. The hallucinations were annoying, especially when he recognized them. That somehow made it worse, because it left him with no choice but to wait them out and worry about what would happen if they got worse or didn’t stop.

The infection, the real doctor noted, was chronic, but not contagious, which she found fascinating, because normally it would have been quite virulent.

No, should have been, were her words.

Should have been.

Then she asked him to hold out his arm, injected him with something before he could react.

The two doctors who had guided him in at the start returned, helped carry him out of the room when his legs gave out. Through it all he was still able to hear, watch what was happening, he just couldn’t react in any way.

Another injection was administered, or that was what the real doctor had said, he hadn’t been able to turn to look. She went on to explain that it was an attenuated version of the T-virus because the T-virus was so effective in transgenic research and that it might facilitate him fully bonding with his infection, giving him all the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

He’d almost been willing to believe that this was the radical, illegal treatment that Mia had brought him there for, infecting him with another virus to combat the one he already had.

Then the two doctors dumped him in a cell, naked, without his medicine.

The way they left him, laying on his side on a pile of sheets, had allowed him to look out, watch them leave and then struggle to focus his eyes on what was in the hall across from him.

It was a man.

Had been a man.

At the time he hadn’t been that bad, so saying that he was a man was true. Tall, muscular, bearded, kind of intimidating. No, more than kind of, but he’d been watching with an expression of concern.

The man was proof that Mia had been wrong, that there was something wrong with the situation.

Ethan had felt his arm start itching before he could move enough to scratch it. Willing his left arm to move to scratch his right became the focus of his attention. Watching his fellow prisoner wat nothing compared to that.

It took a small eternity, but finally he was able to scratch.

Scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch.

The man was still watching him, looking very worried, but Ethan didn’t care.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch!

SCRATCH!

He kept at it until his arm and hand were wet with blood and bits of his own skin were stuck beneath his nails.

Maybe he’d keep scratching until he hit bone.

Then the itch would be gone.

The man was watching him, worry turning to horror. He was reaching through the bars of his cell, pounding silently on the glass, lips moving, but no words, no sound.

Ethan finally forced himself to stop, at first convinced that it couldn’t be as bad as it looked because it was painless and the blood was already stopping. The injury he’d inflicted on himself, though taking up about half of his lower arm, as already scabbing over.

A thick, dark scab that looked like it was spreading while he watched, but that might have been a hallucination from not having taken his medicine in…

He didn’t actually know how long it had been and a growing scab was hardly the most frightening thing he’d seen. The worst had probably been the day in the hospital where he’d kept seeing Mia’s mangled body everywhere he looked. She’d come to visit that day and he’d barely been able to focus on her. How could he when she’d also been laying sprawled in the doorway, a pool of blood spreading around her lower body, one of her legs in the corner of the room and the other one nowhere to be found. He’d been sure that it was under his bed and he considered asking Mia to check, to remind him that the real her was the one talking to him, not the one dead, but twitching on the floor.

Growing scabs, spreading pools of blood, eventually a growing fellow prisoner.

That last one had been slow and slight at the start, but he’d known it was a hallucination, the teeth growing outside of his mouth and down his neck proved that, more so than his arm, arms actually, one big one on the left, a normal one and a smaller one of the right.

He might not even have a fellow prisoner, maybe the man had been a hallucination from the start because a B.O.W. certainly wouldn’t watch his deterioration so calmly, with a look of pity on his? its? face.

That made as much sense as any of it, a hallucinatory B.O.W. that felt bad for him.

He certainly felt bad for himself.

Because the scab had spread and deepened and grew thick tendrils of fibrous…something, up to his shoulder, and down to his fingers, longer, past the tips, hardening into claws. Very good for scratching, at himself, but also at the doctors? guards? when they brought him food. They had to hold him against the wall with poles when they brought food or cleaned his cell. Occasionally they hosed him down as well, not that it did any good.

The mutamycete continued to spread, down his whole right side, taking over, making it something else. It wasn’t him that wanted to attack the doctors, he figured that out at about the same time he stopped being able to eat properly. It was the molded. It wanted all the food to itself, used his right arm, the arm that it had taken from him, to grab the food and bring it to its mouth. Food that he couldn’t eat anyway. The mold was in his throat, making it so he couldn’t swallow.

The molded would growl at the guards, lunge at them when they walked by, scraping its claws at the glass and gripping the bars in its teeth, forcing his head at an awkward angle because of where its mouth was, starting somewhere around the side of his nose and going all the way to the back of his head. He couldn’t see the fangs, but he had felt them on more than one occasion.

The molded fought him, grabbed at him with the claw that used to be his arm, occasionally hooking his hand and pulling it into its mouth. It wanted to eat him, finish making him it, but he fought back. Sometimes he’d be able to grab its claws, wedge them between the bars and break them off.

And yet he wondered, maybe the doctors were trying to help him. On occasion they’d force him and the molded to the ground, force something down its throat or put something into the food that drugged it, made it quiet and sluggish and let him have his body to himself, what little of his body he had. When the molded was asleep he could use its arm like his own, but mostly he took advantage of that to break its arm or do as much damage as possible to it.

During those times he decided that they were trying to help and that the treatment had gone wrong. Because other than the monster across the hall from him the hallucinations were gone and he no longer felt any urges to hurt himself.

The molded on the other hand…

He and the thing trying to hijack his body were in a constant war.


	4. Jake

He’d had a good reason for accepting the job, two good reasons actually. One, it was a lot of money for what essentially amounted to standing around and doing nothing outside of some place in the middle of nowhere. Two, that particular bit of nowhere was in America and that meant that when he got time off he’d be able to go and visit Sherry.

Besides, he’d looked into the company, the Sonoran Research Outpost was some little start-up thing in Arizona and it looked legit. No strange projects, no questionable sources of funding, if anything the place had a hard time getting started, but the bioresearch boom in Africa was giving them a much needed boost. They had a sister facility being built in Africa according to the research he’d done, filling in the hole left by Tricell most likely. Their claim to fame seemed to be growing drought resistant potatoes, hence the desert location and that had been where he’d lost interest in looking further into anything about them other than if they’d been able to pay him the promised amount. From the looks of things they would, and that had been the end of that.

Sure enough the amount he’d asked for upfront went through and he was on his way to Arizona. He hadn’t been sure of what he’d expected, but the two story, cement block building was fitting for a place that made super potatoes. It was the most boring and utterly mundane thing he could have imagined, which was a disappointment. He’d been expecting some sort of lab out of a bad movie, because it was an American super potato farm, but it was distressingly ordinary. The desert was interesting at least, which was a good thing since he spent several hours each day walking laps around the building in the most pathetic, half-assed patrol imaginable. There was nothing of interest in the area, no one who would want it and there certainly wasn’t any way someone would stumble across the place by accident. It was a good thing that here was a lot more to the desert than sand and rocks, because otherwise he would have been bored out of his mind.

On the back half of his lap of the building there was the bunch of weird, scrubby plants where a loud, obnoxious bird lived. If he yelled at it the bird squawked back and was utterly unafraid. Along the one side where there was a fence of sorts, a half fallen down length of chain link,  he would occasionally come across a turtle, the same turtle each time, doing a little patrol of its own. Much like the bird, the turtle wasn’t afraid of him and would watch him. Once he stood it its path, just to see what would happen and the thing walked right past him, stopping several feet away to pull the leaves off of a low growing bush. He’d never know that turtles ate plants, but apparently they did.

It was bad that the most interesting part of his first week on the job was finding out what turtles ate and that one of the researchers at the facility sang in Portuguese in his sleep. He knew that last one because he slept in the same wing of the building as the researchers. He also ate meals with them in the little cafeteria area. None of them ever talked to him, not that it mattered because he had no interest in what they were doing. He was there for a job, not to make friends.

Otherwise he was in danger of being bored out of his mind due to the lack of phone reception around the lab. He’d been thinking that he could call Sherry in his down time, surprise her by making plans to get together, but that would have to wait until he could find an excuse to get permission to use one of the lab’s cars to take a ride to somewhere when his phone worked.

At the end of the first week one of the researchers approached him cautiously, made some noise about how there might have been a chemical leak in one of the labs, nothing harmful, but would he please agree to a blood test. He agreed, but informed them that it would cost them because his blood was valuable. It wasn’t that he thought that they wanted his blood to sell it, but it was valuable and if he’d been in the researcher’s position, if the test came up clean he’d sell what was left for sure and he didn’t want any of them making extra money off of his being there if he didn’t get a cut of it.

The researcher agreed, either having been informed of who he was, or just assuming that because he was in it for the money he’d be looking to get a little more if possible.

The blood test was utterly mundane, a quick jab, three vials of blood and then it was over. The researcher who’d been put in charge of it had been holding a bit of gauze on his arm to stop the bleeding when the angriest looking girl Jake had ever seen entered the room.

Had one of the researchers brought their brat in? Because that was his first thought seeing her.

She stared at him with an expression of hatred so intense that Jake was at a loss. It was a look he’d gotten plenty of times before, but then there’d always been context.

The researcher who’d drawn his blood stepped nervously out of the room, avoiding eye contact with the girl.

Jake started to get up to leave.

“Stay,” the girl demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.

The gesture brought his attention to the object she was holding, a pressure injector by the looks of it. Between that and the realization that she was dressed in a lab coat he came to the conclusion that she must have worked there, maybe a college student working as an intern

“What’s your problem?” he stood up and started to walk past her.

Quicker than the eye could follow her hand darted out and she jabbed him with the syringe.

Reflexively he went to punch her but she dodged and caught his fist in her hand. Her speed had caught him off guard, but it was her strength that was the real surprise.

“Jake Muller,” she spat, making his name sound like the worst imaginable profanity, “It took me this long to figure out what to do with you, you ungrateful bastard.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he tried to twist out of her grip, but she held fast, “Who are you even?”

Her look of rage deepened, “That’s why you disgust me. You don’t know who I am and after learning who you really were you didn’t have the decency to take on your father’s name. Instead you continue to use the name of some miserable, dead…”

She trailed off, shaking her head.

He could only stare at her in shock. She had to be making some sort of mistake, because otherwise it meant that she knew who his actual father had been.

“Listen, you’ve got me confused for someone else, so how about you let me go and then you can explain –”

She cut him off by twisting his wrist until he was sure that it was going to break.

“I’ll explain,” she scowled, “Though it’s more than you deserve. I hired you because I needed your blood to enhance the C-virus. My plan had been to kill you the first day and take what I needed because I figured you were too dangerous to let live, but when I saw you I couldn’t. You look too much like Albert. So I kept you around, wondering if you took after him in any way other than the legacy carried in your blood. You don’t though, you must take after your mother, lacking ambition, drive, any sense of purpose. I have no clue what Albert saw in her, but I can certainly see why he discarded her and abandoned you after he was done. I still could have killed you, should have, but my plan isn’t to kill people, but to save them, even someone as wretched as you. In time perhaps you’ll embrace who you are and make something of yourself and I’m generous enough to give you that chance. Of course figuring out how to elevate you when you’re immune to nearly every Progenitor derivative was a challenge, but it was the thought of poor, ambitious Albert that gave me the answer. Uroboros could infect us and should do the same for you.”

“So you…” he looked down at the blood dripping down his arm from where she’d injected him, “You’re telling me that…”

“Yes,” she smiled, “I injected you with Uroboros, Albert’s magnum opus. At least that way you’ll get something other than your looks from him.”

That was more than he was willing to listen to. There was no way what she was saying could be true, yet she clearly knew the truth about him and…

She had to be crazy, whatever her motivations, there was no way that she’d managed to get her hands on something like Uroboros, not in a place like this out in the middle of nowhere.

“You’re crazy,” he jerked his hand back, this time managing to break free of her grip.

Not bothering to wait for a retort, he took off running.

He had to get out of there. Even if they didn’t actually have any of the viruses she claimed that she was working with, they still had a sample of his blood, which was both valuable and potentially dangerous. He had to get out and warn somebody. He wasn’t sure who. The BSAA maybe, but he wanted as little to do with them as possible, especially if when they came the crazy bitch let slip who he was. First things first though, he had to get to safety.

Most of the researchers he ran past had the good sense to get out of his way. Those that were too slow he shoved roughly aside and the one that actually tried to stop him received a punch to the jaw for his trouble, laying him out cold.

Jake made it out of the building and went straight to the garage where the facility’s vehicles were stored. That was where things went wrong. The garage was open and neither of the two trucks were there. Today of all days, it was almost like it had been planned.

Behind him the girl and a group of researchers emerged from the main building. Two stood on either side of her, armed with rifles of an unknown make.

Unarmed, he had no choice but to run out into the desert and hope that he could lose them. If he was able to get one of them away from the others, get their gun, he might have a chance. Then he’d be able to double back, steal a truck when they got back or find a way to call for help.

For now though, all he could do was run.

What the girl had said continued to echo in his head as he ran. She claimed to have infected him with Uroboros, a virus he knew by name and reputation, but not much else. It had been the big one, the one that would have ended the world if not for the BSAA, but that was the extent of what he knew, other than that it was supposed to work fast. He still felt fine though, so that had to mean that he wasn’t infected, or that the girl had been wrong and he was immune to it, just like he was immune to everything else.

He looked at his arm. The bleeding had stopped, the blood itself was dry and flaking off. No sign of infection, no sign of any changes.

His pants and shirt were clinging to him like a second skin, but that was because he was sweating like a pig, which could also be explained by his running in the hot sun. Any discomfort he felt, the ache in his head, the flashes of light in front of his eyes, the way he could practically feel the movement of blood through his veins could be explained by how hard he was pushing himself. There was no way he could be infected because he still felt fine.

Chancing a look behind him Jake saw that the researchers and girl were still following him, they weren’t gaining on him, but they hadn’t given up.

He had to keep going, a little farther and he’d be into a hilly area with scattered trees and dense brush. There was a chance that he could lose them there and then wait until night. Under the cover of darkness he could sneak back and figure something out. All he had to do was shake his pursuers.

Tufts of grass were scattered between the rocks here, forcing him to slow down as the terrain grew treacherous. One misstep and he’d twist an ankle or worse. Some fifty meters away there was a meandering line of trees, likely marking where a dry streambed was. If he could make it that far there would be hiding places and the going would be easier.

He slowed down to a jog, his shirt plastered to him by sweat. When he lifted an arm to wipe the perspiration form his face he felt seams pop.

What was Uroboros supposed to do?

He knew that he wasn’t infected, because it was supposed to work instantly, but how? It killed everyone infected, but in what way? Collapsed into a horrible mess, was the one bit he could remember hearing, but what did that mean?

Skirting a pile of loose stone he made it to the trees and found that he’d been wrong.

The brush was too dense for him to do anything more than walk and making it to the streambed itself didn’t help either. The whole thing was choked with piles of brush and dead trees from whenever the last flood had washed through the area.

He tried to press on, find some way forward, but some of the bushes had long thorns that caught his clothing and scraped shallow cuts across his skin that burned from the sweat.

It was too hot out, too bright out. He needed to get out of it, find shade so that he could sit and think.

Ignoring the thorns he kept going, forcing his way through the brush so that he could sit in the shade of one of the trees. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the sun beating down on him.

The ache in his head, behind his eyes, slowly subsided and his vision returned to normal. His mistake had been pushing himself too hard too quickly, he’d panicked and he was paying for it now. He could make all sorts of excuses for it, that he’d been caught by surprise so badly that he’d acted without thinking, forgotten how dangerous the desert could be, but the end result was the same.

Blood flowed sluggishly from the cuts on his arms, drying to black in the hot air. He was dehydrated. That was the explanation for why he felt the way he did, why his vision was drifting in and out of focus.

He could see the veins twitching beneath his skin, struggling to carry blood thickened by lack of water. His vision swam, the black lines of blood and veins seeming to shift across his arms.

Closing his eyes he leaned back against the tree and waited for the feeling to pass.

Noise, somewhere behind him getting up he saw that his pursuers were closing in, only a few hundred meters away.

He got up to run and immediately fell as vertigo overcame him. Several agonizing minutes were wasted rolling on the ground in pain and waiting for his vision to clear.

By the time he got up they were too close, one of them was taking aim.

He dove out of the way, thorns from the bushes digging into his back.

No, not thorns he realized as a bright orange object fell to the ground, darts. He’d been hit by a dart. The mysterious rifles the researchers carried were tranquilizer guns, or he hoped they were. There was no telling what the darts carried, just like he didn’t know what the girl had injected him with.

Not Uroboros, it couldn’t be Uroboros.

He’d be dead by now if it was, if the virus would even work on him.

It wouldn’t work on him.

Gritting his teeth he struggled to rise to his feet. Moving was a struggle.

Tranquilizers or the earlier injection taking effect?

He didn’t know, all he knew was that his legs felt numb and his head muzzy. It was hard to focus.

By force of will alone he was able to rise to his feet and stagger forward a few more steps before another dart hit him in the back.

The girl was screaming for them to stop, that they didn’t know what dose would be lethal for him given the state he was in. One of the researchers argued with her, insisting that he’d be down already if it had been enough.

Jake smiled despite himself, apparently he wasn’t just immune to viruses, but sedatives to some extent.

Then his feet got caught on a fallen branch and he stumbled to his knees, barely managing to catch himself in time. Something snapped, the branch, because he could see the splinters sticking out of his palm, feel the pain from where they were lodged in his skin.

Around them thick strings of blood dripped from his hand, not falling, not flowing, simply dangling there, swaying slightly as he moved.

What the fuck was he seeing?

The researchers had continued to advance, stopping about ten feet away and spreading out to surround him.

Two of them had rifles that they kept aimed at him, the rest had catch poles.

One of the catchpole ones advanced, tried to get him around the neck. He grabbed it with his injured hand, the red-black strands wrapping around the pole, surging forward to wrap around the man’s arms before he could get away.

More strands now, from his hand, arm, up to his shoulder and across his back, pouring out of the cuts there, grappling the researcher.

Jake clenched his fist and they constricted, pulling the man closer to him. He could feel his struggles, but even exhausted from heat and dehydration Jake was still stronger, he’d choke the man, take the pole so he had a weapon and then he’d –

A third dart hit him right in the center of the chest and this time the world faded to back and nothing.

o0o

When he regained consciousness it was a slow, painful process. Awareness returned with the pins and needles sensation of circulation coming back to a limb. The fact that he could move freely, his fingers twitching across the floor as he flexed them to hasten the return of sensation, meant that he wasn’t restrained.

Opening his eyes he looked up at the dull gray ceiling above him. He’d been captured, obviously, and brought somewhere, probably somewhere in the facility, some part of it he’d never been shown and not been curious about. It was silent and well lit, not bright enough to hurt his eyes, but enough so that he could see fine. That was good, the blurriness was gone and he felt fine.

Or almost fine, he was lying flat on his back, which was uncomfortable because it was putting pressure on…

He sat up, black tentacles writhing around him. They were coming out of his arm, little splinters mixed in with them, not wood, but bone. Shards of it growing out of some of them, needle thin past where his hand was – should have been. There was no hand beneath the tentacles, just more shards of bone, larger, too large and too many. There hadn’t been that much bone in his arm, the majority of it had to be newly grown.

The tentacles weren’t just his arm, they’d grown from his back as well, that was why laying down had been uncomfortable. He could see them under the tattered remains of his shirt, feel them writhing.

This was Uroboros.

He got to his feet, staggered toward the bars of his cell, reached through them only to discover a wall of thick glass. They really had thought of everything, because if not for the glass he wouldn’t have had any trouble grabbing the first person who walked by and forcing them to let him out.

He leaned against the bars, tentacles wrapping around them as he stared out into the hall.

He wasn’t alone, there was a B.O.W. of some kind in a cell across from his, a big hulking thing with three mismatched arms, one huge one of the left, two more normal sized ones on the right. It stared at him, an eye on its left shoulder wide and unblinking. Even though it had more fangs than could fit into its lipless mouth, its face was expressive. It wore a look of pity, for him.

“Fuck off,” he muttered.

He didn’t want sympathy, especially not from a B.O.W., even if they were stuck in the same situation.

The exact same situation, because he was a B.O.W. too, wasn’t he?

He stared at the tentacles weaving between the bars, then looked back at the B.O.W.

It was gesturing silently at him, mouth opening and closing, but no sound escaping.

Ah, the glass was soundproof.

And the B.O.W. was intelligent.

Maybe he could learn something from it about the situation he’d found himself in, if he could figure out a way to communicate with it.

It might not do him any good, but there was no telling.


	5. Chris

It was a more or less routine training exercise, one specifically for Special Operations Agents. Half of it was comparing notes, half of it was keeping up to date on the latest dangers they might be facing and practicing dealing with them in a sort of roleplaying situation. Normally Chris didn’t have patience for that kind of thing, but getting to talk about the times they’d actually succeeded was a nice break, especially after Edonia and China. It was also a nice chance to talk with guys he hadn’t seen in a few years, reminisce about all the times they’d saved humanity from certain doom and, like B.O.W.s, the stories mutated with time. Right now he was in truck with Parker Luciani, and Josh Stone on the way to a little training scenario, something to do with a simulated plaga infestation. The driver was supposed to fill them in on the details, but at the moment he was just listening to the three of them, nodding along intently, often asking for them to tell more. Though he was wearing a gasmask that hid his face, the driver’s tone made it clear that he was thrilled to be in the presence of three such famous agents. The nice thing was, he was being polite about it, asking intelligent questions rather than gushing praise and acting like an idiot.

So maybe they weren’t treating the exercise as seriously as they were supposed to, but so what? There’d been a sort of vacation atmosphere to the whole thing since the start and there really wasn’t any better way to deal with biohazard threats than to play it by ear and take things as they came. All the preparation in the world wouldn’t do them any good when every scenario was different, something that had come up repeatedly during the past few days.

Stopping at a fork in the road the driver stopped to check the map.

“Well, this sucks,” he grumbled, throwing the map to the floor, “They want us to go onto that bumpy, twisty little road. I’m gonna have to take it slow so you mind if I roll up the windows and crank up the AC?”

The three of them agreed, it was an excellent idea, Josh adding that he hadn’t thought it actually got so hot in America.

The driver turned the AC to max, but it took its time cooling down, during which the conversation died off to the occasional complaint about the heat.

Eventually the driver took a little portable MP3 player out of his pocket, “You mind if I put some music on? I know we’re not supposed to, but I figure it’s going to be a long ride and it’ll kill some time.”

“What kind of music?” Josh sounded concerned.

Chris didn’t blame him for that. The previous day he’d been introduced to the genre of ‘dubstep’ and had developed a paranoia about what he now called ‘American music’.

“I don’t know, classic rock, maybe early metal?” The driver shrugged, “I’ve got a bunch of stuff on here. If any of it bugs you I’ll change tracks.”

The kid’s taste in music was questionable, but not horrible and it eventually just became background noise to their conversation.

The pauses grew longer, Josh eventually leaning against the window and falling asleep.

Parker yawned loudly, “I think he has the right idea. This trip is getting boring.”

“How much farther?” Chris asked.

The driver shrugged, “Not much more. Maybe five minutes at most. Then the worst of it’s over.”

Parker nodded and slumped down in his seat.

Soon he was snoring loudly.

In response the driver turned up the volume of his music when the next song came on.

It was an obnoxious one, jarring piano notes and an annoying, repetitive chorus made even worse by the driver tonelessly singing along and keeping the beat by tapping his hands on the steering wheel.

Chris was about to ask him to change tracks, but when he tried to speak an ear popping yawn overcame him.

“Close your eyes, take a rest,” the driver suggested cheerfully, “You’ve got a crazy time waiting for you at the end of this. Everyone does really, but that’s a ways off. I’m actually kind of jealous, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Chris yawned again, head lolling to the side. It was uncomfortable, but moving felt like too much effort.

“I guess you don’t,” the driver laughed, “But you will, but it’s a good thing, the end of bioterror.”

Chris smiled to himself as he dozed off, the kid was way too optimistic about the amount of good the weeklong event would bring. Had he ever been that hopeful? He didn’t think so, but maybe he had been. He fell asleep thinking about his own youth, when he’d first joined the Airforce, back before Umbrella and everything that had come with it. Maybe then he’d been more of an optimist.

o0o

He wasn’t in the truck anymore.

That was the first thing he knew.

The second was that there was no way in hell this was part of the training.

He was in a small, dimly lit room somewhere, little more than a cell.

It was a cell he realized complete with bars, and there was someone sitting in a chair on the other side of them.

When he recognized them he wondered for a moment if he was still asleep and dreaming.

What would Barry’s adopted daughter be doing here?

Wherever here was.

“I’m glad that you’re awake Christopher, I really am,” Natalia smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. It never had, that was something Chris remembered from the few times he’d met her. She’d been through a lot as a kid and it showed, but now there was something off about the smile, something that brought a twist of fear to his stomach.

“What’s going on?” he pushed himself up into a sitting position, looked past her to see if he could figure out where he was. There were more cells across from his, probably on either side as well. One of them had an occupant, but it was too dark for him to see more than shadows moving anxiously back and forth.

“I’m trying to be gracious, keeping humanity’s needs in mind,” Natalia smiled beatifically, “At no small sacrifice to myself. You have no idea how much I want to kill you, to see you suffer or watch as you degenerate into a mindless monster for what you did to Albert, but I’m going to give you as much of a chance as the rest of humanity.”

It was a speech he’d heard too many times before, the details were different, but the intent was the same. Grabbing the bars he pulled himself up so that he was standing. The effort was painful, everything ached, like he’d spent the previous day trying out some ridiculously ambitious new workout plan. That was exactly what it felt like, the stiffness, the dull aches in muscle groups that he didn’t normally think about.

“Why Natalia, after all you’ve been through?” Chris realized that he didn’t know the girl well enough, but Barry had raised her and he and Barry had been friends. How could a kid Barry had raised be talking like that? It didn’t make sense.

She lowered her gaze, “That’s exactly why. I can’t expect you to understand how I suffered, how we suffered, I don’t think a brute like you is capable of something like that. Just understand that I want to spare humanity that kind of suffering, in the long term at least. In the short term there will be plenty to endure, but humanity will be stronger for it in the end. That’s why I’m sparing you and the others, even when, by right, I should kill you for what you’ve done. Humanity will need its heroes, examples to look to for guidance. I’m under no illusion that I’ll be loved for what I’m doing, at least not right away, but in time the species will mature enough to understand, and what I’m doing will give it that time. Until then I can wait because I’ll have time as well.”

Chris glared at her, his vision blurring in an out of focus.

She smiled back at him, “And don’t think my sitting here antagonizing you is just me being petty, that’s only a part of it. You see, there’s a theory that certain strains cause mutations that reflect the host’s state of mind. With my t-Phobos that certainly was the case, remaining dormant until the hormones released in response to extreme stress triggered it. It also seems to be reflected in the way the C-virus weaponizes its hosts. So I’m curious what will happen to someone like you, an unthinking brute, a monster in human form. How will you look when you turn into something that reflects what you truly are? I’m sure –”

“Shut up!” he shouted, straining against the bars. Listening to her was making his already horrible headache even worse. He’d thought getting sucker punched by a Napad had been bad, but this reached a whole new level of agony. With the Napad at least he’d passed out afterwards. This time there was no end, it built and built, the pressure growing, redefining the concept of a splitting headache.

It wasn’t just his head though, his whole body ached with the same intensity, like his skin was too small and at any moment muscle and bone would burst through.

He could almost hear the bones of his skull sliding against each other. Something popped and the pressure abated slightly, his vison clearing, but things were still wrong. He could see too much, too far to each side.

The C-virus.

He remembered the J’avo, their extra eyes. What had happened to Piers during the fight with Haos, right before…

“What did you do to me?” His voice rose up into a scream as he felt another pop and his jaw came unhinged.

No, not unhinged, it was just that his mouth was opening wider than it should have, making room for rows of fangs. He could see them if he looked down, jutting out at odd angles and it got easier to see them as the bones of his skull continued to slide into new configurations, the front of his face protruding out into a wide, blunt muzzle.

“You!” he gripped the bars and snarled at her, watching as his fingers thickened and fused into three massive, blunt claws, his thumb little more than a hooked spur of bone. Unable to hold onto the bars he let go and staggered back, a stab of fear making it through the rage threatening to overwhelm him.

What was happening to him?

The popping and sliding continued, racing down his spine, pressure building along his shoulders, muscle and bone sliding beneath his skin, growing and making room for something.

He could see it happening, the muscles of his arms twisting and bulking up, rents and deep crevasses opening in his skin, skin that was thickening and hardening into inflexible armor.

It cracked and popped when he moved, chitinous plates grinding against each other.

Something tore down his back, not his shirt, that had already fallen away in tatters, this was something new.

He could feel something pulling, near his shoulders, some weight settling into place, forcing him to lean forward. Tilting his head he was able to see a pair of heavy, scorpion like claws had sprouted from his back.

Roaring he charged the bars.

Natalia leapt out of her chair, but it was unnecessary, his hands and claws were too large to fit through the bars, though not for lack of trying. He grabbed them with both hands and claws and pulled with all his might, putting further strain on his still changing body, joints popping as his arms continued to increase in size and strength.

Despite his efforts, it was all for nothing. The bars held fast.

Natalia took a step forward, right there, but infuriatingly out of reach.

Growling in frustration Chris pressed his muzzle through the bars, snapping at her.

An expression of genuine concern flickered across her features, “Christopher? Are you still there? Can you understand me?”

He could understand her just fine, he just wanted to kill her, get out and dig his claws into her, pull her in close, sink his teeth into her throat, tear her guts out, break bone and pull off limbs with his claws, bite her face off, crush her skull and spit the bloody mess back out onto her. Never in his life had he wanted to kill someone so badly, not even Wesker for what he’d done to Jill.

Jill.

Oh god, what would Jill think if she saw him? He could imagine her look of terror, the smell of her fear. Like everything else it enraged him, but –

Jill.

His claws slid from the bars, down to the floor. When he tried to stand up straight he found he couldn’t. Instead he was forced to back away on all fours. There was one last loud series of pops from his back as bone, muscle and armor stretched out into a thick, heavy tail that swung stiffly behind him. Newly formed muscles flexed along the tip, armor plates spreading out into a heavy fan of sharp edged chitin plates.

“Yes, Jill,” Natalia smiled at him.

He must have spoken out loud.

“I’ll see to it that you’re reunited when the time comes,” she smiled, “She’s going to prove a particular challenge though. I don’t think that even Uroboros will touch her. Given time I might be able to further modify the C-virus though. It’s certainly worked wonders for you.

Roaring, he threw himself at the bars, continuing to struggle long after a glass wall slid between him and Natalia and she finally walked away.

He had to get out, get her, kill her before she hurt Jill.

That was all that mattered, saving Jill.

He continued his fruitless assault on the bars and glass until he was too exhausted to move.

Steam seeped from the gaps between armor plating as he lay there panting, staring out at the hall. There was something in the cell across from his, a vaguely familiar something, but he was too tired and sore to put much effort into making sense of it. B.O.W.s tended to blend into each other after a while, he’d probably seen something infected with the same strain and…

Concentrating was too hard when he could feel muscle and armor sliding slowly against each other. It was uncomfortable, but not painful.

By the time he fell asleep his form was caught in some halfway point between human and what he’d become.

 


	6. Josh

Josh Stone woke up in a bed in a hospital room with no memory of how he got there. His first thought was that there’d been an accident of some kind, but that didn’t feel right to him. Something about the situation felt wrong in a way that he just couldn’t put his finger on.

When he tried to sit up to get a better look around the room he discovered that he was secured to the bed by restraints across his arms, legs and chest. That wasn’t suspicious in and of itself, but he didn’t like it.

He called out, not for help exactly, just for someone to come.

The only sound he could hear was his own breathing and the steady beep of the machine monitoring his heartrate.

After several minutes of waiting he gave up and started to reassess his situation.

From where he lay he couldn’t see any windows and the door to the room was closed.

It was the door he focused on because it was something to look at other than the blank walls and machines. The door was a heavy, reinforced thing, designed to stand up to repeated impacts. It almost made sense if this was an American hospital that belonged to the BSAA. During the training exercise he’d quickly learned that most agents in the American branch were obsessed with the idea of big, powerful B.O.W.s, hunter and Tyrant classes, so it made sense that was what they’d prepare for if they thought someone was infected with something.

He doubted that they assumed he was infected with anything, but given his history he couldn’t blame them for being careful.

The problem was, he just couldn’t shake that there was something off about the situation.

Something wasn’t adding up.

He remembered falling asleep in the truck and that was it.

The driver had complained about the road.

Maybe there’d been a crash.

But if that were the case Josh would have expected to be in pain or at least aching. He’d been sedated before and he didn’t feel medicated. There were the lingering effects of whatever had been used to keep him under, headache, nausea, odd little discomforts, but he wasn’t on anything and none of those little discomforts added up to anything that would require him to be in a hospital like this.

Had there been an attack of some sort? A bioterrorism incident targeting the BSAA itself, get its best agents, leave it unable to organize a response to the follow-up? It was as logical as anything that had been discussed during the training, but it still didn’t add up.

If something had happened he was sure he would have remembered more.

With nothing to focus on his discomforts quickly became the object of his full attention. He itched, but was unable to scratch and that was maddening. The beeping of the heart rate monitor picked up its pace as he grew increasingly frustrated. His back, shoulders and head ached and itched horribly and wiggling in place only made it worse.

Concentrating as he was on trying to do something about his discomfort he failed to notice the door open until the young woman came in and started walking to his bed.

Immediately he stopped and relaxed, an answer was coming.

“What happened?” he urged when she remained silent.

Her face was blank with poorly concealed rage as she checked his restraints, making sure they were secure.

Whatever had happened had been bad then. Some biological agent had been released and…

It didn’t add up, not to the situation he was in now, no matter how he looked at it.

Once she was satisfied that his restrains were in order she took a step back, “Where should I start?”

Her voice was cold, she made no attempt at being comforting. In any other situation it was something he could appreciate as practicality, but given how little he knew he would have liked a little more than that.

“At the beginning.”

She fixed him with an icy stare, “This is the beginning, for you at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He demanded, but she had already turned and started walking out of the room.

She paused and looked back at him, “I suppose do owe you an explanation because of the part that you’ll be playing in what’s to come.”

Wherever he was, it wasn’t a hospital that belonged to the BSAA, that much he was sure of now.

“You’ve been infected with the T-Veronica virus. It’s supposedly one of the more adaptable strains and was used in the creation of the C-virus. I want to see for myself how well it works.”

With that revelation she left and closed the door behind her.

He didn’t think that the infection was an accident.

Somehow he’d been captured and…

He wasn’t sure. Made a test subject from the sounds of it, but why? How?

Aware of what had been done to him, the small discomforts took on a new meaning.

The itching grew worse. Was it spreading?

The restraints felt too tight. Had they always been and he just now noticing it or was this a new development?

At least the spike in heart rate was something he could explain and he tried to calm down, think clearly.

He’d been captured and infected with one of the rarer varieties of the T-virus. He didn’t know much about it because it wasn’t something that anyone ever expected to encounter. There had been, he thought, two incidents with it and those had booth been small and isolated. Did that mean it wasn’t as bad as the others, not potent enough to be used as a weapon, or was it too dangerous?

What was going to happen to him?

It was a T variant, so that meant that odds were he’d just end up a zombie, but after spending time with the American and European agents he couldn’t help wondering if something more dramatic might happen.

What was the Veronica strain supposed to do?

He tested his restraints again.

They were tighter, threatening to cut off circulation to his hands.

Sitting up as much as he was able he could see them.

His hands were changing.

It was subtle, but there was something off about the color of his skin, a cool grayish tint shot through with fine lines of green in some places. His nails, previously cut short had grown and thickened, starting to taper into claws.

Turning his head he was able to get a look at his shoulders. The discoloration was worse there, patches of skin distinctly grayish green and starting to turn scaly. The same thing had to be happening across his back. He could feel the scales snagging when he moved.

He had to escape and contact help before it was too late to stop whatever was being done here. It was already too late for him, infected and symptomatic, there was nothing that could be done, he just had to hope that he could do something before he was too far gone to do any good.

Straining with all his might, he tried to free his arms.

He could see thick, green veins standing out beneath his skin, watch as his nails became claws and continued to grow.

Whatever was happening to him was happening fast. It meant that he didn’t have much time, his mind was likely to start going at any minute.

Twisting against his restraints he found the heavy, reinforced bands fastening his arms to the bed start to give way.

Further effort was rewarded by the strap around his right arm breaking. After that it was the work of a few seconds to unfasten the remaining straps and sit up in the bed.

The first thing he did was rub the sensation back into his numb hands, then he scratched at the scaled patches on his back. Brittle shards flaked away beneath his claws. Looking at where they fell he saw that a number of them were stuck in the blanket on the bed, along with a number of fine, thorn-like hairs.

If he had to hazard a guess, he probably wasn’t going to end up a zombie.

Whatever he ended up as, he hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to kill when help came. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt any fellow agents.

What he had to do was get out of the room, find a way to contact the BSAA, tell them of his condition and then lock himself away somewhere so whatever he ended up becoming wouldn’t be a threat to them.

Sliding off the bed he walked over to the door, the claws tipping his toes clicking against the floor.

The door was locked, not that it surprised him. He grabbed the handle and jiggled it a few times, experimentally putting his full weight behind it, just to see if it would budge. It didn’t, of course, it was reinforced, clearly designed to hold back something far stronger than any human and he wasn’t there yet.

Given time there was no telling what would happen, which was why he couldn’t afford to wait.

He walked a lap of the room, carefully looking for anything that might help him escape and found nothing.

He then tried the door again, alternating between pushing and pulling until he felt something start to shift under the skin of his back. Reaching back he found the scales there were sticking up straight, exposing the bristling hairs beneath them, pushed upwards by some pressure building beneath.

The changes were continuing, towards what end he couldn’t begin to guess.

Another circuit of the room, checking for anything he might have missed the first time.

Still nothing.

The bed was on wheels, so for lack of anything better to do he rolled it across the floor and shoved it against the door as hard as he could. Flimsy as it was the bed crumpled immediately.

A glance down at his arms showed how much further things had spread. The majority of his skin was grayish-green now, only a few rapidly fading patches remained that looked normal. Scattered scales had erupted at irregular intervals, ragged looking things with frayed edges and more of those needle like hairs beneath them.

Surprisingly, his mind seemed mind seemed fine so far.

The woman had mentioned that what he was infected with had been used to create the C-virus and those infected with the C-virus retained some of their intelligence, so there was a chance that the situation he was in would be similar.

He might have more time than he’d originally thought, but that wouldn’t help him unless he could figure out a way to get out.

This time when he went back to the door he looked it over carefully for any sign of weakness. A B.O.W. wouldn’t think to do something like that, so there was a chance there might be some flaw that he’d overlooked, an oversight that wouldn’t have mattered against an unthinking monster.

Nothing, and he’d even gotten on his hands and knees to see if there was a gap along the floor.

When he stood back up he realized that the changes were more than skin deep. He was getting taller, his limbs longer, but there was little accompanying muscle growth, giving the impression of emaciation. Between that and the discoloration of his skin he looked like a dead thing.

Absentmindedly he scratched at a patch of scales on the back of his arm, his claws catching on one rooted a little more firmly than the rest and cutting into his skin.

There was a flash of heat and the bitter smell of smoke.

Of course, C-virus mutants would sometimes combust under the right set of circumstances and some similar process seemed to be at work with him.

That might be something he could use, but was there anything in the room he could set fire to in order to escape?

Not directly, but there was a smoke detector in the room. If he set of the alarm that way would someone come?

Only one way to find out.

Taking the sheet from the bed and wadding it up into a ball he placed it beneath the smoke detector.

Closing his eyes, he dragged his claws across his arm as he held it over the pile. This time the heat was far more intense, drops of burning blood trickling down his arm and hitting the sheet where they flared up into a small blaze. The injuries quickly closed themselves before his eyes, leaving nothing but wisps of smoke where his blood smoldered away to nothing, and patches of blackened scales where the blood had contacted them. His skin itself healed rapidly.

By the time the alarm went off he was already completely healed, the damaged scales starting to flake away revealing new ones beneath.

The way the scales fell away and regrew like that didn’t make sense, but most of the viruses didn’t make sense as far as he was concerned.

For good measure he pulled the thin bit of padding off the bed and added that to the fire to keep it going.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before he heard a commotion outside in the hall.

The door opened the merest crack, but it was enough, he got his claws into the gap and pulled it open the rest of the way, jerking the man who’d been holding onto it off his feet. There were half a dozen of them, they all looked like scientists, armed with little more than fire extinguishers and catch poles.

He shoved past them, knocking them over and into each other.

One of them managed to get his arm with the catchpole, but he pulled sharply away, dragging them several feet before they let go.

Another, smarter than the rest, ran screaming down the hall. That was where he had to go, after them. They were either going to a control room or to get help.

Something hit him in the back and he made the mistake of turning around. A blast to the face from a fire extinguisher blinded him and a catchpole closed around his neck. Pulling back again he tripped over the fire extinguisher that had been thrown at him and slammed into the wall.

The skin along his back tore, muscles that hadn’t existed moments before twitched and pulled.

By the time his vision cleared he had a pair of wings. Too small to fly, they weren’t exactly feathered, rather they were covered in scales that broke away with every move he made, crumbling into fine powder and drifting through the air.

The men who had been attacking him all writhed on the floor, gasping and clawing at their throats and faces. Every inch of exposed skin was covered in angry red welts and shining blisters. Their breathing was a horrible choking rattle as they suffocated. One by one they fell still.

The powder coming off his wings must have been toxic, much like the spores released by certain C-virus mutants.

He hadn’t meant to kill them, but he’d had no way of knowing what would happen and they’d been the ones holding him captive, preforming human experimentation. They hadn’t deserved to die as horribly as they had, but they hadn’t been innocents.

Carefully, he continued to make his way down the hall, heading in the direction that the one that had gotten away had gone.

As he walked he became more and more aware of his changes. He was much taller than he’d been, enough so that when he opened doors to see what was on the other side he had to bend down to look inside and the ceiling was only a few inches from his head. That put him at nearly eight feet, on the short side of average for a Tyrant, but he clearly wasn’t a Tyrant. He had no clue what he was. A B.O.W., that much he knew, yet he was still himself. The lack of mental changes was almost as disturbing as the physical changes.

The hall ended at a stairwell, leaving him with three options, up, down, or turn back and try the opposite way.

Above a door slammed open and three men carrying rifles and clad in full body biosafety suits, complete with gasmasks came running down towards him.

He turned and ran back the way he’d come from, back to where the bodies were, only to find that all the men he thought he’d killed had gotten up and were standing there, staring blankly ahead.

He skidded to a stop, but none of them responded in any way to his arrival, they remained standing there, slack jawed and unblinking, eyes red from burst blood vessels.

One of them caught sight of his pursuers and let out a wet moan, bloody froth trickling from his mouth.

They were dead, but they’d reanimated.

The five zombies rushed his human pursuers and Josh realized that he had no idea where he was and had the exact sort of scenario that he’d never imagined would happen on his hands, there had been a safety breach at a lab, a B.O.W. of unknown type had escaped and there were zombies present.

Suddenly escaping was a lot less important than stopping a potential outbreak. The men with the rifles were the ones behind all this, not worth saving, but if a zombie got out the risk of innocents was too great. For all he knew the lab was in the middle of a crowded city, just like the infamous Raccoon City.

He had to stop the zombies, then he could worry about escaping.

Focused on the men that had been chasing him, the first zombie he grabbed did nothing when he hooked his claws into it, merely trying to pull away from him and get to its prey.

Having caught it he had no idea what to do, so grabbed it by the head and slammed it into the wall, hoping to break its neck or fracture its skull.

He ended up doing more than that, completely shattering its skull.

He was much stronger than he’d been, something that would make killing the rest of the zombies easy.

Distracted by stopping the zombies he’d unintentionally created he never felt the tranquilizer darts hitting him until he fell to the floor on top of the last remaining zombie. He and it struggled for a time, neither able to get up, until he finally passed out.

o0o

He woke up staring at a ghost.

Somehow Wesker had survived and captured him.

Or at least that was what he’d believed until his head cleared enough and he realized that Wesker was in a cell as well.

Wesker stared at him, telltale tendrils marking him as being infected with Uroboros, a fitting fate for the man, infection and captivity.

Confident that he would be rescued, he found some small degree of satisfaction that Wesker had cheated death yet again, it meant that he wouldn’t escape justice for what he’d done.

Wesker wasn’t simply watching him though, he was moving his hand through the air, tracing something out in the empty space. It took Josh some time to realize that it was letters of the alphabet, that he was spelling something out to something.

Seeing his look of realization Wesker smirked and nodded, then continued what he was doing.

E-  J-U-S-T  F-I-G-U-R-E-D  I-T  -O-U-T

As he watched Josh came to an unpleasant conclusion, the man wasn’t Wesker, but he looked similar enough to maybe a clone. He’d heard rumors of that sort of thing, that the technology was being used in some parts of Europe to mass-produce Tyrants. It was all rumor as far as he knew, but rumor had to be based on something.

The doppelganger pointed at him.

N-A-M-E?

And in that slow, awkward manner he introduced himself and learned that the doppelganger was named Jake Muller and had nothing to do with Wesker.

The last bit was spelled out with angry, sharp movements and a particularly dark expression, suggesting that Josh hadn’t been alone in his assumption.

The cells on either side of Muller contained more B.O.W.s.

The more human looking of the two, the one that could still walk upright, tried to join in the conversation, but its movements were erratic and it tended to trail off halfway through a thought to pace. When it was able to spell anything out its statements were disjointed at best. The most Josh could figure out was that it was named Ethan Winters and that it kept asking if Mia was alright. Through Muller he was able to learn that Ethan was worried about his wife, who was either missing or was in the hospital for treatment for something. He and a fellow prisoner, who Josh couldn’t see due to the positioning of their respective cells, had been able to figure out that much, but it was hard to be sure of much more than that.

The other B.O.W. was a massive armored thing, walking on all fours with a third set of limbs, heavy claws like those of a scorpion, just behind its shoulders. The thing stopped its pacing to stare at him, tilted its head to the side like it was watching what he was doing, then let out a roar and charged the bars of its cell, biting and clawing at them.

When Josh asked his fellow captive anyone else had been brought in at the same time as him Muller crossed his arms, really folded the mass of tendrils that was his right arm over his left and stared blankly at the wall.

The armored, insectile B.O.W. continued to bite and pull at the bars.


	7. Parker

Of all the ways Parker Luciani had expected to die, waking up tied down to a table while a man in lab coat injected him with something hadn’t even made it to the top ten simply because he’d never imagined that he’d end up captured. Getting mauled by a B.O.W. or torn apart by a swarm of zombies had been far more likely, above even getting into a car accident because of stupid idiots who drove too fast and didn’t look where they were going. The thought of being captured and experimented on had never even entered his mind.

He tried to ask where he was, what was being done to him, but he was groggy and unable to string a coherent sentence together. The fact that he wasn’t sure if he was speaking English or Italian probably didn’t help, proof of how out of it he was.

He passed out, sparing him the embarrassment of further futile attempts at conversation.

When he next woke up he felt better, which wasn’t to say he felt great, he had a splitting headache, but he could at least keep track of his thoughts and when a young woman entered the room he was able to smile at her, though his head hurt too badly for him to think of something to say that was equal parts witty and scathing.

To his surprise she smiled back at him, “You were there for what happened in Terragrigia.”

“Umm, yes?” Not the cleverest rejoinder he’d managed, but her earnest enthusiasm had left him off balance. He knew he had fans, but he hadn’t imagined that bioterrorists or crazy scientists ranked among them.

“I wouldn’t be here without you and I’m thankful for that,” she said without a trace of irony, “And for your helping stop the T-Abyss virus from being released, not that it was likely to be much of a problem, considering how diluted it would have ended up being. It was a good example of how not to spread a virus really, an empty threat in the end, but still thank you. I really am thankful for what you were part of, the events you helped set in motion.”

“Thankful enough to let me go?”

She laughed, “Oh, I don’t plan on keeping any of you here for too long, half a year at most. I’m getting close to accomplishing my goal, I just need to run a few more tests and then I’ll be able to set my plan in motion. Once that’s done with you and the others will all be allowed to go.”

“You’re planning on letting us go?” He’d expected crazy, but he wasn’t sure exactly how the promise of release was supposed to be a threat, unless maybe it was a bribe, that if he and the others behaved things wouldn’t be so bad for them.

“Of course, once testing is done,” she actually seemed sincere, or crazy, maybe both.

“And what sort of testing?” This was where he expected the other shoe to fall, they’d be free if they survived and they probably wouldn’t survive.

“To see how different varieties of biological agents work on human test subjects. My goal is to create several, more adaptable subspecies of humans, as well as vastly increasing the lifespans of individuals, hopefully making them immortal. In the long term my goals are the same as yours, to protect humanity,” she looked him over, staring a bit too long into his eyes, “In your case I’m trying something a little different. It’s common knowledge that individuals infected with plaga parasites are far more durable than uninfected individuals, that the plaga strengthens the host in some way. The only downside is that there are dominant and submissive forms and that the lesser forms are far more common. With you I want to see the degree to which a submissive form host is influenced by a dominant form that has no interest in directly controlling it.”

So that was it, she’d infected him and the others with plagas and would try to control them, frightening, but it wasn’t a death sentence, at least not if help came in time.

“So you’re the dominant one,” he smirked, “But you’ve still got me tied down.”

Her eyes went wide with surprise and then narrowed as her smile became knowing, “Not at all. You’ve been infected with a dominant form, wildtype, because the weaponized types Tricell made are far too aggressive for my purposes. In case my work with Uroboros and the enhanced C-virus fail I’ll need something to help save the unfortunate individuals immune to the viruses I’m working with. It should take about a week for your plaga to mature, the dominant ones tend to develop more slowly, part of what makes them easy to identify, but so rare. As larva they’re outcompeted by their lesser siblings.”

o0o

For two humiliating days he was kept tied to the table, lab coat clad scientists feeding him and keeping him clean while guards watched. During that time he tried to figure out if the woman had been telling the truth or not.

He didn’t feel any different, though he didn’t know what being infected with a plaga felt like. The headache started to fade midway through the second day, abating entirely if he kept his eyes closed, but that didn’t mean anything. The lights in the room were unpleasantly bright and it was normal to get a headache from bright lights. It wasn’t a sign of a plaga.

He was sure that if there was a plaga growing inside him he’d be able to feel it somehow.

On day three he was handcuffed, blindfolded and untied from the table only to be dragged to another room and secured to a new table, face down this time.

Some sort of scan was run, he could hear the hum of the machine.

From time to time one of the scientists would poke his back or neck.

Comments were made indicating that there really was a plaga in him and that it was growing at the expected rate, that it was large enough for the next step of the process.

He didn’t get the chance to wonder what that was before something cold, metallic by the feel of it, was slipped around his neck.

There was a moment of pressure, the feeling of something being tightened and then a sharp pain.

His blindfold was removed and he was untied, though the handcuffs remained on.

Three scientists looked at him nervously while two guards in gasmasks watched impassively behind them.

His hands went to his neck and he felt what seemed to be a collar around it.

His first thought was some of the ridiculous action movies he’d seen, “What the hell? Is this thing going to blow up if I start trouble?”

The scientists looked nervously back and forth between themselves, whispering hurriedly as they argued over who was going to explain things. From the sound of things none of them actually wanted to.

Parker cleared his throat loudly and glared at the guards. One of them hefted the catchpole they were carrying, the other adjusted his grip on his rifle threateningly.

Point taken.

The one with the catchpole spoke up, “There are needles in it, positioned that they’ll stab the bug if a button in the main control room is pressed. And no, I’m not going to tell you where that is.”

The bug, the plaga.

“So now what?” ignoring the scientists he addressed the guard.

The man made a dismissive gesture, “If I had my way we’d be taking you to the cells with the other, but that’s not what the boss wants. She wants you up here for the testing so we’re going to walk you back to your room and keep you there until testing’s done.”

So he was free, sort of.

o0o

The next few days were uneventful. He was given food and water three times a day, escorted to the showers when he asked about cleaning up, though they refused to give him even a safety razor to shave. He wasn’t sure if he should be flattered that they thought him that dangerous.

In the showers he got proof that something was wrong with him, not necessarily a plaga, but something. Looking in the mirror he discovered that the whites of his eyes were a bright, near uniform pink from inflamed blood vessels. Disturbing, but not terrifying.

During that time he ended up on good terms with the one guard, if such a thing was possible given the circumstances. The man wasn’t an asshole at least, he had a sense of humor and he answered most questions. His answer for why he was working at the compound had proven disturbing.

The man, though seemingly sane in all other respects, agreed with the woman who ran the place, that humanity was in danger of extinction and that infection with the very viruses the BSAA was working to eradicate was its only hope. He was working for her in the hope that when it was all over he’d be infected with either the C-virus or the T-Abyss.

Parker thought he was crazy, but not the worst crazy he’d encountered during his time working for the BSAA and the FBC before that.

When asked about the plaga the man grew evasive, saying that part of the test was for him to figure it out on his own.

Parker had thought that it was his way of avoiding the topic, that maybe the plaga wasn’t even real.

It was when he was being walked back from the showers that it all fell into place. One of the scientists was walking by and froze in his tracks as he and the guards approached.

The researcher was infected with a submissive form plaga. Parker didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.

The guards caught on to what was happening immediately. Looking back Parker realized that they’d figured it out before he had.

The scientist stood there, looking dazed.

Parker could feel something happening, he didn’t know what, but something.

The plagas were communicating, sending signals between the two of them, pheromones, but also sound that he felt more than heard.

The woman hadn’t been lying, his plaga was a dominant form and he knew, instinctively that the infected scientist would obey him.

“Remember,” the more talkative guard spoke up, “We’ll kill you if you try anything.”

The scientist turned and stared at him, the plaga inside him responding to the threat. Blinking slowly he took a hesitant step forward.

“Tell him to back off,” the second guard warned.

“Take it easy,” Parker wasn’t sure if he was talking to the scientist or the plaga inside himself. That it had been there for a week, growing without him noticing was unnerving. Now that he was aware of it he could feel the thing moving. It was big, enough so that he could feel its individual limbs and tail, slender and multi-jointed, wrapping around his back from the inside.

The scientist stopped, but continued to stare at the guards, his expression utterly blank, the plaga waiting.

When the guards resumed escorting him back to the room where he was being kept the infected scientist lunged at them, knocking one of them to the ground. They rolled on the floor, locked in a desperate struggle. The guard may have been better at fighting, possibly even stronger, but he couldn’t match the mindless ferocity of the infected scientist.

The guard who was still standing punched Parker in the nose. His vision went grey and he fell flat on his ass, his eyes watering and leaving him blind.

Something clicked in the collar around his neck, he could feel a faint mechanical hum, warning him that it was about to engage.

“I didn’t tell him to do that,” he tried to make a joke of it, but he was terrified. He was about to die because he hadn’t been able to control the plaga.

Whoever had activated the collar didn’t care.

Another click then pain like nothing he’d ever felt before.

o0o

He hadn’t expected to wake up, but somehow it happened anyway.

He was laying on the floor, unable to move. His first thought was that he was tied down, but that wasn’t it. He couldn’t move at all, or even feel his arms or legs.

He couldn’t feel anything really, he was numb from the neck down.

The woman from the first day was kneeling a few feet away, bars separating him from her.

“I didn’t expect you to survive that,” she sounded impressed, “But the plaga managed to move out of the way in time to avoid being killed. It was hurt fairly badly, but it should be fine in a few days, which is more than I can say for you or Doctor Russo. It seems that plagas aren’t going to give me the results I was hoping for. The submissive forms are too aggressive, taking over their host as soon as they encounter a dominant form. Now that we’ve isolated him from you he’s trying to regain control, but the plaga is putting up quite the fight. Mentally he’s a lost cause so I’m going to have to see what it is about dominant form plagas that allows the host to remain in control. I know that they’re less aggressive by nature, but clearly there’s more to it than that.”

“What happened to me?” he demanded, wishing that he could get up, or even move.

“You were more or less internally decapitated,” she gave him a wry smile, “The plaga is keeping you alive and in time you’ll either recover, or more likely, the plaga will continue to grow and in time be able to replace your damaged nervous system.”

Standing up she dusted off her knees and walked away, leaving him with nothing to do other than stare straight ahead.

Completely paralyzed there was nothing for him to do other stare out into the hall. In a cell across from his there was a massive B.O.W. that looked like a cross between a gorilla and a giant bug. The thing was throwing itself at the bars again and again, trying desperately to get out and get the woman, or maybe him. When the thing paused to catch its breath, or get ready for its next charge, he didn’t like how it stared at him.

He was thankful that there were bars between it and him given how helpless he was.

The plaga moved, he could feel it.

That was pretty much all he could feel, the plaga’s long limbs slowly flexing and stretching as it figured out the extent of its own injuries.

It would recover.

He might recover.

At least the lights weren’t so horribly bright here.


	8. Leon

The DSO didn’t often get anonymous tips and when they did the information was typically passed onto other organizations, so there must have been something special about this one, not that Leon had been filled in on the details of what made it different enough that he’d been sent to investigate, all he knew was what was relevant to his mission. A little bioresearch facility out in the middle of nowhere was up so something vaguely menacing and he was to go in and see what it was. He’d been told to expect anything and had been equipped accordingly, but so far other than the heat and a single annoyingly persistent fly that landed on his nose every time he stopped to gain his bearings, there was nothing outright menacing about the area.

He’d left his car a mile back to try and circle around the place, approach it from the side rather than the front just in case there was more to the little building than met the eye. Even if there was, he wasn’t worried. One building with nothing else in the area wasn’t likely to hold anything dangerous to him, not when there was so much open space that escaping if trouble happened would be easy, not that he expected there to be trouble.

All he was supposed to do was check out the place and see if there was anything strange about it from the outside and see if the layout of the place matched what was on record.

So far it was singularly unimpressive and the only discrepancy was that it looked half abandoned. There was no one visible outside, no sign of vehicles coming or going in the time he’d been there and off to one side there was a place where the fence was half fallen down.

It seemed like the perfect place to approach for a closer look.

Around the fallen section of fence there was an area of sand that had been cleared of rocks and brush, maybe twenty feet long and ten feet wide, possibly a sign that something was underneath. That might have been what he was looking for, evidence of an underground bunker.

It wasn’t something he could report without investigating though, because if he was wrong it would turn into a story that he’d never be allowed to live down.

His plan was simple, walk over to the middle of the cleared patch, maybe dig down a few inches or stomp a bit to see if it felt hollow underneath.

A simple plan with no space for anything to go wrong.

Something that was proven wrong with his first step onto the cleared area.

He put his foot down and the thin tarp stretched across the hole in the ground gave way.

He fell and landed hard on the concrete bottom of the pit some ten feet below.

Sitting in just over a foot of water he stared up at the smooth sides of the pit.

About three feet from the top there was a series of small holes slowly trickling water in.

His first thought was that maybe it was part of a drainage system, but that didn’t make sense given that the place was out in the desert.

So he’d fallen into a pit full of water next to a research facility in the middle of the desert. That was a mystery for sure, but not of the sort that he’d been sent in to solve.

Carefully he got to his feet, checked himself over for injuries and, discovering that other than a few scrapes and bruises he was unharmed, he made his way to the side of the pit.

The walls were too smooth for him to climb and when he grabbed onto the tarp to see if it would support his weight he pulled it down into the pit on top of him.

It seemed he was stuck, but at least he wouldn’t need to worry about heat or thirst while waiting for help to come.

Except when he tried to radio for help all he got was static. No reason to panic though, help would be sent in as soon as he failed to report back in, it wouldn’t be too long a wait, maybe a day at most. Two days if something really crazy happened. He could survive for two days in a foot of water in the desert.

It would be easy, just a matter of waiting.

The only things was, the covered pit was an obvious trap and he’d walked right into it. Someone would likely come to check in on him once they realized that their trap had caught someone. That might complicate matters.

For the time being all he could do was sit and wait.

From time to time, to cool himself off, he’d lay back in the water or splash some over himself. The water was clean other than the dust that had fallen in with him, slightly salty and the flow in seemed to match the rate of evaporation, indicating that there was some purpose to the pit that he didn’t understand.

It was just another mystery, one he hoped would be solved soon.

All in all it was a strange situation, especially when he realized that there was a second series of holes below the waterline, opposite from the ones higher up on the walls. Water was flowing into them, he could tell because when he moved and disturbed the dust in the water it moved towards the holes. In maybe half an hour, by his estimate, most of the dirt near the holes was gone, suggesting some sort of filtration system.

The sun continued on its path across the sky, rising higher until it was beating directly down onto him. Light reflected off the water, blinding him and it quickly became uncomfortably hot. More and more of his time was spent laying down and trying to cool off. It wasn’t long before he could feel himself starting to get sunburned.

He was also starting to get dehydrated. It felt like his tongue was swelling up in his mouth, but drinking the brackish water would only make things worse. He had to keep reminding himself of that, because being in water up to his knees made the temptation to drink maddeningly strong.

In an attempt to force himself to ignore his thirst he got up and walked another lap of the pit, trying to figure out if there was something he had missed. Just to see if would do any good he gathered up the tarp and tried to throw part of it up and over the top of the pit, maybe if he could get it to catch on something he could climb out.

The effort only managed to pull more dirt into the water and down onto him. Dry dirt stuck to his skin, making the itching worse and he quickly lay down to wash himself off.

Immediately the itching stopped.

Or mostly stopped. He scratched at his back and felt his shirt snag against something.

Had he somehow managed to get dirt under his clothing?

No, it was that being soaked through had it clinging to him and laying back in the water all the time was making it worse.

When he tried to pull off his shirt the wet fabric ripped.

All along his back and sides were hard, little white lumps, some of them had broken through the skin, revealing small serrated triangles.

There was something, some sort of virus, in the water and he’d been exposed to it.

Had he fallen into some sort of waste disposal system for the facility?

He renewed his efforts to get out, in desperation trying to climb the smooth walls of the pit, in the process tearing off several of his nails. It hurt, but not as badly as when claws grew in to replace them, on his right hand at least, on the left it was more of the little serrated growths.

They didn’t look or feel like bone, but he couldn’t quite place what they were, just that they were continuing to erupt through his skin along his sides and back.

Running his tongue across his parched lips he could taste salt and blood. His gums were bleeding and when he investigated with his tongue he felt something move.

Grimacing in disgust, he spat out a small hard object which he bent down to retrieve.

It was a tooth.

He prodded where he expected the gap to be and found that there wasn’t one, to the contrary he could feel more teeth breaking through his gum line, forcing his original set out of place. Dozens of serrated fangs filled his mouth.

He looked down at the growths breaking through his skin.

Teeth, they were teeth.

“What the hell?” he muttered, or at least tried to. The words came out a soft, slurred mess, his tongue too thick and his lips stretched too tightly over all those fangs for him to form the sounds correctly.

He was covered in teeth, on his back, along his sides, in spiraling bands up and down his left arm.

Frantically he threw himself at the walls of the pit, actually managing to get some height this time. He was stronger, slightly taller if how his pants no longer fit was anything to go by. Maybe if he got a running start he’d be able to throw himself up high enough to get out. It was worth a try at least, because maybe if he got out of the water the process would stop. He knew it wasn’t likely, but it was the only chance he had.

Again and again he tried, getting slightly higher each time, his progress marked by the streaks of water left where he’d hit. The problem was, all too frequently he had to stop to submerge himself to prevent his skin from drying painfully. He tried to hold out, to resist, but the pain was too much, he knew it was only making things worse, but he couldn’t help himself.

One last desperate attempt brought him within a foot of the top, he might have been able to make it if not for the realization that he was clinging to the wall with claws that had burst through the toes of his boots.

In his shock he let go and fell back into the water.

He lay there for a long while, the sun beating down on him as he tried to catch his breath.

Something was wrong, the air was too thin for him to breath. The changes, slow and slight, were picking up their pace. Starting around the teeth his skin grew rough, changing to a sickly gray as the muscles beneath twitched and swelled. Tendons snapped and bone creaked as they grew, hard keratinous growths bursting up between the teeth.

Thrashing in the water he clawed his way out of his boots. His toes, in addition to being tipped with claws, had grown longer with thick webbing connecting them. The same thing had happened with his hands, or his right hand at least. The left was free of webbing and the proportions were still the same, though fangs were starting to break through the skin of his palm and his arm was covered in an increasingly thick layer of armor like growths, fangs sticking out at odd angles from the layers of hardened flesh.

If there’d been any doubt about it before, it was clear that he was turning into something aquatic.

Blood tinged foam dripped from his fangs as he struggled to breathe, his tongue lolling out as he panted. The pallid, muscular appendage reached nearly to his chest and was covered in fangs as well, though they seemed to be retractable, emerging as it twisted and coiled in the dry air.

His lungs burned and his chest ached with every useless breath until he felt something start to pull at his ribcage, new muscles twitching wildly beneath his skin until it tore. Twin rows of deep, red slits opened along his ribcage.

Letting out a choked scream he fell forward into the water.

Slowly the pain abated.

He could breathe again, the slits were gills.

When he stood up they flared in the air, feeling raw in the heat. Muscles that hadn’t been there before twitched and they closed. He could still breathe with his lungs, but barely, the muscles that had once allowed him to inhale having shifted and atrophied to make room for the new set that had grown in.

He staggered back, trying not to trip over his claws, and got ready to make another run at the wall. This time he might make it.

He didn’t and each successive attempt was weaker. Breathing air was close to holding his breath and he had to lay back down in the water to let his gills work. Even if he got out he wouldn’t make it very far, maybe to the building if he was lucky, but what would he do when he got there other than suffocate?

Hearing movement above he tensed and reached for his gun. It was still there, but would it work after being in the water like this? He thought it might, but he wasn’t sure.

Someone in a black biohazard suit looked down into the pit, saw him and nodded.

Though he wasn’t in any position to make any demands Leon took aim at him, struggling to hold the gun steady between his webbed right hand and nearly immobile left.

His attempt at asking what they were doing was little more than a wet hiss, his tongue getting in the way, extending to coil snake-like. Shaking his head he swallowed it down and tried again.

“Waah ah yoo ooing?”

Slightly better, almost words, but the man didn’t seem to understand the question or care that he had a gun aimed at him.

Honestly, Leon couldn’t blame him.

The man walked away, only to return several minutes later with a second man and a tarp that they spread over the top on the pit so that half of it was shaded.

“Don’t worry,” one of the men reassured, “She’ll be back tonight to explain things. Until then you’ll just have to wait.”

Leno let out a growl of frustration, but it wasn’t like there was anything else he could do. At least there was the promise of an explanation.

Staying in the shade made it easier, as did an increased flow from the pipes, raising the water level by another two feet.

Eventually he lay back beneath the water, watching the clouds drift by overhead and marking the passage of time by the movement of the sun.

At least the changes seemed to have stopped.


	9. SHerry and Helena to the Rescue

Sherry had been horrified when she’d heard the news, that Leon had gone missing while investigating some suspicious activity in Arizona, but at the time she hadn’t been able to do anything about it because she’d been in Europe on a mission of her own, trying to track down Jake Muller. During their last conversation, some two months ago, he’d said something about starting work again, that while he had enough money not to need to he was getting bored. After that he did what he usually did and seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. She hadn’t worried much about it, what there was between them could hardly even be called a long distance relationship, they simply exchanged emails and phone calls from time to time and if there seemed to be anything more to it, that was probably just her reading too much into things, but she wasn’t the only one who thought that way.

When Jake failed to reply to the offers made through the DSO to try and acquire further blood samples, she was the one that had been sent over to investigate.

She hadn’t had any luck, but not for lack of trying. In the end every lead she followed was a dead ended and left her with no more information than she’d had to begin with.

Jake was a mystery, he had next to no friends and the ones he did have hadn’t been terribly willing to talk to her, and most of his previous coworkers were either dead or just as impossible to find as he was. There was talk that he might have gone down to Somalia to get in with one of the more legitimate groups working there to stabilize the region, which lined up with his last conversation with her. It was easy to imagine that he’d sign up with one of the mercenary groups working there, use it as a stepping stone to join a more respectable private security company and work as a contractor. He’d hinted that the job he was looking at was one where she wouldn’t have to worry so it almost worked to think that he was trying to clean up his reputation. There was only one problem, in previous conversations he’d been adamant about never wanting to work anywhere in Africa, no matter how good the pay was. It was to the point where he’d frequently warn her against going there if the subject ever came up as part of her job with the DSO. He never went into details, but apparently he had known some guys who got in big trouble for doing the right thing when they should have left well enough alone. Jake never told her what that was supposed to mean and she never asked. They were close, but not that close, or so she kept telling herself.

It helped keep her from feeling guilty about having to abandon the search for him and heading back to find Leon.

Helena Harper had met her at the airport in Arizona, a newer agent and a friend on Leon’s she’d been assigned to the mission as backup because she’d been in the area for political reasons and that was all she could say on the topic, other than that she’d had to pull some strings to get reassigned when she heard Leon was missing.

It made Sherry feel better to know that she wasn’t the only one who was worried.

The whole ride out to where Leon had last been heard from she was jumpy. There was nothing about the little research facility out there to make anyone suspicious, except apparently someone that the DSO considered a reliable source had suggested that what they said there was more to the place than met the eye. Leon’s vanishing while investigating the place seemed to confirm that, which had Sherry outraged that they’d waited a full week to bring her back rather than sending someone else in, but the choice hadn’t been hers to make.

The whole ride in she was watching out the windows as Helena drove down the thin dirt road.  She was expecting the worst and that was what saved them. Any other time she would have dismissed the little glint of light out in the desert as a mirage, but given the circumstances she wasn’t so sure. Leaning forward to try and get a better look she motioned for Helena do the same.

Helena followed her gaze and immediately swerved in the nick of time.

The shot the sniper fired would have killed Helena if it had hit her. Instead it struck Sherry through the chest, something agonizing, but survivable for her.

The next shot took out one of the car’s tires, forcing Helena to stop.

Helena had panicked, but Sherry managed to convince her to run, that she’d cover her escape.

Struggling to breathe as her body worked to repair the damage, Sherry drew her gun and fired in the general direction of the sniper. It wasn’t about hitting him, just about keeping his attention on her. She could probably survive anything he could hit her with as long as he didn’t shoot her though the head. Even then it might not be enough to take her out long term, though she didn’t want to think about what that kind of injury might do to her. Over the years her regenerative abilities had been put to the test and she could recover from just about anything with a speed to rival any B.O.W., but the one thing that had never been investigated was if she could recover from injuries to her brain.

So she kept her head down and kept moving.

It took two more shots for the sniper to realize that she wasn’t dying, not that she was in any condition to keep shooting. By that time where the sniper was hiding was obvious and Helena was able to deal with him.

Immediately Helena ran back to see how she was doing and had been shocked to see that she’d already healed from the first shot. In between bouts of coughing up blood and damaged tissue Sherry was able to smile and reassure her that everything was fine, that she’d survived worse and in a few minutes she’d be good as new.

Helena had seemed doubtful until she looked at her wounds for herself, watching them close and fade away without leaving so much as a scar.

After that they proceeded with greater caution, making it within sight of the facility in just a few minutes.

What had happened hadn’t escaped the notice of the guards there and there were half a dozen of them walking around the outside of the building, patrolling and waiting for them to arrive.

Keeping low the two of them tried to avoid notice, see if there was a way in that wasn’t guarded, or some angle they could approach from where the guards would have a harder time dealing with them. There was plenty of brush as well as a few fair sized piles of rocks and dirt, likely left over from the building’s construction that they tried to hide behind as they crept forward.

Sure enough they found something, though neither of them could figure out what it was.

Off to one side there was a place where a section of the fence around the place was missing and the guards were keeping away from it.

It was odd enough to merit further investigation.

Cautiously they inched forward, ready to run or fight if they were spotted.

It looked like there was a hole in the ground, a sinkhole maybe, which would explain why the guards didn’t want to go near it. Sherry was ready to turn back and look for another way, but Helena kept going, keeping behind a group of three rather large rocks as best as she was able.

“It’s not natural,” Helena commented, pointing at the hole, “It’s a perfect rectangle and they’ve got a tarp over it. There’s something down there.”

“But why are they keeping away from it?”

Sherry got her answer when one of the guards got close enough that his shadow fell over the mysterious hole.

Something gray-brown lunged out and tackled him to the ground. Sherry couldn’t get a good look at it from where she was, but it was easy to assume that the thing was a B.O.W. of some type.

The guard tried to bring his gun up to shoot the mystery B.O.W., but the thing grabbed his wrist and twisted. When the guard refused to let go of the gun the thing struck him once with its club-like left arm. There was a horrible crunch and the fight was over. Letting out a horrible choking noise, the B.O.W. grabbed the gun from the dead guard and retreated back to where it had come from.

The rest of the guards had arrived by this point, saw their mangled companion and kept well back from where the thing was, before taking position and getting ready to open fire.

The two of them were pinned down, they couldn’t go any farther, but retreating would leave them open as well.

“I can try and distract them,” Sherry offered, “Or maybe see if I can take one of them out before they can –”

“No,” Helena cut her off, “I don’t care if you think you can handle it, I really don’t want to see you get shot again.”

Chancing a look around the edge of the rock pile that they’d retreated to, Sherry saw that the guards were starting to spread out and advance, being very careful of the hole where the B.O.W. was.

It didn’t do them any good.

The B.O.W. leapt out, fired three shots in rapid succession. Two of the guards fell, one dead by the time he hit the ground and the other not likely to survive his injuries without immediate medical attention. The remaining guards returned fire and the B.O.W. once again retreated.

“It’s smart,” Helena said, sounding more terrified than Sherry had ever heard her, “Why on earth were they keeping it out here where it could escape?”

 From where it was hiding the B.O.W. made a series of wet hissing noises.

“Not happening,” one of the remaining guards shouted, “You’re not going to escape. Toss the gun up and keep down or I’ll radio in and have them drain the water out. How long do you think you’ll last?”

More hissing. Going by tone, because she couldn’t understand the noises the thing was making, Sherry thought that the B.O.W. didn’t sound too worried.

“Let’s go,” Helena hissed, “While they’re distracted by that thing.”

It was a good idea, but Sherry couldn’t bring herself to go along with it, not until they found Leon, besides, though she wasn’t going to admit it, she was curious about the B.O.W. there was something about it, how quick it had been to attack the guards and how it was clearly intelligent that made her wonder. Something was preventing it from leaving, and though it had already killed three guards, it was now content to talk to the ones that were left.

The B.O.W. made a gargling sound followed by more hissing.

“The only way that’s happening is if what we’re doing here succeeds,” the guard continued his argument with the thing, “She already told you, once it’s over you’ll be transported to the coastal area of your choice and you’ll be free to do whatever you want then.”

“Come on!” Helena urged.

“No,” Sherry finally realized what the thing was doing, distracting the remaining guards. They could use it to escape, but she couldn’t do that, not when the guards were talking about releasing the B.O.W. There was no telling the kind of damage it would do if it was allowed to go free, “I’ll take out the one on the left, leave the one that’s doing the talking.”

Helena looked like she wanted to argue, but in the end she nodded, “On three.”

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three!”

Given the distance it shouldn’t have surprised Sherry that her first shot wasn’t perfect, merely wounding the guard so that he fell to the ground screaming. Helena fared better with the one she’d been aiming at, actually managing to kill her target.

Once again the B.O.W. emerged, this time it walked purposefully over to the remaining guard. The man appeared totally unafraid, standing in place as the B.O.W. loomed over him. Lithe and streamlined for a B.O.W. the thing stood maybe seven feet tall at the most, putting it on the short side for Tyrant, which was what it most closely resembled with its gray and brown mottled skin and badly deformed left arm.

The B.O.W. hissed angrily at the guard, choking and sputtering at him while it gestured with its left arm. In its right hand it continued to hold the gun. Water dripped from it, lank black hair hanging in clumps across its face and Sherry realized what the guard had been talking about earlier when he’d mentioned draining the water. Whatever the B.O.W.s was, it was aquatic. No wonder it hadn’t tried to escape out in them idle of the desert.

For once it seemed that a bioweapons research facility had a location that made sense.

The guard listened to what it had to say and shook his head sadly, “I really don’t know why it upsets you so much. You didn’t lose anything and by the end of the year no one’s going to care. When the time comes I hope to be as lucky as you.”

Red slits along the B.O.W.’s chest and sides, gills Sherry guessed, flared open as it continued to hiss.

This time Sherry was pretty sure she could understood what it was saying.

_You lie._

A long, snake like tongue uncoiled past its fangs as it spoke reaching nearly to its waist. It shook its head and gasped as it struggled to retract the pallid appendage.

The guard’s response was completely unexpected.

“No, and I’ll prove it,” the man reached out and grabbed the B.O.W.’s left arm, “I told you I wasn’t afraid.”

The B.O.W. stared at the man’s hand on its arm, blood dripping down from where its spines had cut into his palm. Without hesitation it lifted its right arm and shot him in the face at pointblank.

Kicking the man’s body aside with an angry hiss it turned to where Sherry and Helena were and, with a great deal of hissing and choking, motioned for them to come closer. When they remained where they were it slowly knelt down, put the gun down and scratched something into the dirt. Then it stood back up and repeated its earlier gesture.

Helena stepped out, keeping her gun aimed at it.

The thing stared at her, took a wheezing breath and slumped down, looking dejected as it backed away and climbed back down into the hole in the ground, leaving the gun behind.

“What just happened?” Helena wondered, staring at the dead guards and the hole the B.O.W. had disappeared down into.

“I don’t know,” Sherry said, warily moving forward towards the gap in the fence. It had been several minutes and no further guards had appeared, making her wonder if the ones they’d encountered had been the only ones. The place was small and six or seven guards and a B.O.W. made sense given how remote it was. They just hadn’t counted on the B.O.W. going rogue in quite the way it had. Like Helena had said, the thing was smart and she didn’t think that she was anthropomorphizing to assume that it had acted to help them. Despite what she’d just seen it do she couldn’t help feeling bad for the thing, trapped and isolated.

It was something she could relate to.

Listening carefully for any indication that the B.O.W. was about to jump out and attack made she her way over to where the thing had scratched at the ground. From how far away she’d been it was hard to tell, but it looked like it might have been writing. The majority of B.O.W.s did start as human, so there was the possibility that it remembered something from then or that it was intelligent enough that someone had taught it to read and write.

The though made her shiver despite the hot sun beating down on her. She hated thinking about how B.O.W.s were made, it was something that hit a little too close to home for her. If things had gone even slightly differently, if Claire and Leon hadn’t been there to rescue her, if they’d been late getting the cure to her, if the cure hadn’t worked… No one had ever been able to figure out what the G-virus would have done to her if it hadn’t been stopped and it was something that kept her up at night. Everyone else she knew who had fought B.O.W.s had nightmares about B.O.W.s, but she was fairly sure that she was the only one who had nightmares about ending up as one, back in the lab where she had spent most of her childhood, everything the same as it had been then except for her.

Forcing the though from her head she looked down at the ground and immediately wished that she hadn’t.

The B.O.W. had written something, something horrifying.

She fell to the ground with a sob, “Helena, we’re too late!”

Immediately Helena was at her side, “What happened?”

Sherry pointed at the words scratched hastily into the dirt.

‘IT’S ME – LEON’

“No!” Helena kicked at the words, as though by erasing them she could make it not so.

“Yess,” came a wet hiss from below

The B.O.W., Leon, climbed back up, this time clinging to the edge of the hole. Up close Sherry realized that she could almost recognize him, what was left of his nose, something about the basic shape of his face, though his mouth had grown wider with fangs jutting out in all directions. His eyes were unchanged and those were what she focused on.

“ ‘s naah oo laa-ee,” he continued, “Wee caah ss’ill ssaa’h herr.”

His voice was unrecognizable, a wet, sibilant hiss, all the sounds sliding together except for when he had to stop and swallow, otherwise his tongue would get in the way. From the way he reacted each time it happened, he seemed used to it, more frustrated by the whole experience than horrified.

It made her feel awful.

“ ‘s all,” several choking noises followed as Leon struggled with the word he was trying to say. His tongue slid out of his mouth, coiling and dragging in the dirt.

Up close Sherry could see that it was covered in little barbs near the tip, smaller versions of his fangs. Leon grimaced and batted the appendage out of the way with his more dexterous right before letting go of the edge of the hole to return to the water. She could hear him gasping and sputtering as he washed the dirt out of his mouth.

“Ssoree,” he apologized and gestured at his chest, “Gillss, naah gooh in ‘iss aair.”

Past the fangs Sherry could see his tongue, moving in his mouth like it had a mind of its own.

He swallowed noisily.

She felt like she was going to faint or be sick, maybe both.

“What happened to you?” Helena blurted out, leaning past Sherry.

“I gaah caa…” he trailed off, “Wahh’ss wrrong?”

“Nothing,” Sherry swallowed hard and closed her eyes, trying not to think of the very thing she’d been trying not to think about earlier, the very worst moment of her life. When she’d been infected there’d been an appendage very similar looking to Leon’s tongue that had been involved. The tentacle from her memories hadn’t been pale, rather it had been deep red, nearly purple, but it had moved like it had a mind of its own and even been barbed, which had prevented her from getting away, from pulling it out when it broke free and she’d finally been able to escape from the thing that had once been her father. It was something that she’d spent a very long time trying to not think about and it was always surprising to find what made her think of it.

Tentacles.

“‘s gonn be aahrigh’,” Leon hissed softly.

He might have been right, but she still felt awful, not just because of what she’d been thinking about, but because he was the one comforting her despite the situation he was in. Leon was living her absolute worst nightmare and he was the one worried about her.

When she opened her eyes she saw that Leon had given up on trying to talk and instead was hastily scratching at the dirt, writing out what he knew.

Apparently the last guard he’d killed had been quite the talker and he’d learned a great deal in the week he’d spent as a captive. He’d gotten careless, ended up infected with the T-Abyss virus, but that was more of an aside. What he focused on was that there were other captives. Three BSAA agents as well as at least two other individuals, maybe more. He stopped and looked pointedly at her before writing out the next bit.

‘ONE OF THEM MIGHT BE JAKE.’

That was all she needed to know. With Jake’s blood there was no telling what the people running the facility could do, but as for Jake himself, he was bound to be fine. Like her, he was immune to everything so it wasn’t too late for him and according to Leon it wasn’t too late to stop what was happening. The viruses being developed were still being tested, multiple viruses, he had been very clear about that.

Dusting off her knees Sherry got up.

Helena lingered a moment longer, “Why though? Why infect you, why make new viruses?”

Sherry looked back to see his response.

‘THE PLAN IS TO INFECT EVERYONE WITH SOME SUPER VIRUS. THEY’RE ALL CRAZY HERE.’

“Just like Carla Radames,” Helena spat.

That was a terrifying though, and with Jake’s blood…

“We need to hurry,” pausing she looked at Leon, upset at herself for being afraid of him, “Are you going to be okay?”

He nodded, tried to smile and quickly scratched out one last message before going back into the water.

‘AFTER WAITING A WEEK WHAT’S A FEW MORE HOURS?’

o0o

Inside the facility was in a state of chaos. Sherry had expected some Umbrella level operation with trained and disciplined scientists running things the way they had been in the labs where she had grown up. Instead it was a free-for-all, men and women, some of them young enough to barely be out of college running back and forth with no clear leader. When they spotted her and Helena they all took off running, except for a pair who were actually fighting over a set of keys. The smaller of the two, a young woman, was holding her own despite the man outweighing her by a good amount. In fact she had him on the floor and he was doing everything he could to keep her from getting the keys.

Exchanging a look with Helena Sherry grabbed the woman and puller her away, getting an elbow to the stomach and several kicks to the shins for her trouble. The man got up, looking like he was about to run until he spotted Helena aiming her gun at him, then he dropped to his knees, begging her not to kill him.

The woman tried a different approach, going limp in Sherry’s arms she tried to reason her way out of things, “If I help you will you let me work for you instead of killing me? I can run most of the stuff here and have a fairly good idea of what’s being done, how it’s supposed to work. I’ll be useful and what I want should kind of solve any issues in the end, it’s why I agreed to work here in the first place.”

Helena looked like she was either going to laugh or swear at the woman.

“We’re not here to steal your research,” Sherry snapped, outraged at the offer being made in the first place, “We’re here to stop it.”

“Oh, I’ll still help you then,” the woman seemed to perk up at the idea, “If I help you I’ll be able to get off easy for sure, do a plea bargain or something. So, what do you need me to do?”

Sherry and Helena exchanged another look. Anything that easy had to be a trap. The man’s response seemed to back up that assumption.

“Don’t listen to that crazy bitch. Do you know why she’s even here?”

“Same reason you are,” the woman practically snarled, “Except I’m not fooling myself about what the results are going to be. Testing’s over, we’re at the mass production stage of things. The results you’ve seen are what we’re going to get.”

“Quiet, both of you!” Helena shouted, “You’ll have plenty of time to explain things later.”

The woman tensed, but fell silent, while the man went right back to begging for his life.

Helena looked at her, then back and forth between their two captives. Sherry understood exactly what she meant, she was the one in charge and was going to have to decide what to do with them. The woman seemed crazy, but it was equally clear that the man would be next to useless.

“You’re holding people captive here?” Sherry started, figuring that she could base her decision on the responses they gave. If she could find Jake the BSAA agents that Leon had been talking about that would be a huge help.

“There are test subjects,” the man spoke first, his words coming out in a rush, “They’re being held in the basement, but they’re dangerous, you don’t want to go near them.”

“I can take you to them,” the woman spoke loudly to be heard over her coworker. I’ve got my keys in my right pocket, to unlock the cells you need the black keycard and my access code. I can give it to you if you want. I’m assuming that you’re here to rescue one of them.”

Neither answer was what Sherry had wanted to hear, but the woman’s was more useful.

Relieving them of their keys she and Helena had the pair walk them to the basement at gunpoint.

The man broke down sobbing in the stairwell, slowing them down. Neither she nor Helena had any clue what to do. If they left him it might turn out to have been an act so that he could lock them down there.

In the end it was the woman who solved the problem.

Glaring at him she hissed through clenched teeth, “You think that the test subjects are the only things here that might kill you? Keep that up and you’ll end up getting us both shot.”

Neither she nor Helena wanted to do that, but neither researcher had any way of knowing that. Getting up he continued down the stairs.

It wasn’t until they reached the door to where the woman said Jake and the unknown others were being held that Sherry even considered what condition the prisoners might be in. Jake would be fine, but the others…

She thought about Leon.

Whatever they encountered she was going to have to be brave, for his sake.

The door opened into a dimly lit hall, rows of cells running down either side. Most of them were empty, but in the ones farthest from the door she could see movement behind the bars and glass.

Cautiously they continued onwards.

Something massive moved in one of the cells, throwing itself at the bars and biting them while it clawed futilely with two sets of mismatched limbs. The upper most, a pair of pincers grasped the bars, while it struggled to reach through with heavy, four-clawed paws. The thing was clearly a C-virus mutant, its six yellow eyes made that much obvious, but it was unique, resembling a napad, but far more insectile. If it had ever been human there was nothing left.

“Look!” Helena gestured to the cell across from the B.O.W., the man in there looking disheveled, but seemingly unharmed as he leaned heavily against the bars. It wasn’t just that he was still human though, he was wearing a BSAA uniform.

“Let him out,” Sherry ordered.

The woman did as told.

As soon as the glass slid back the man spoke in heavily accented English, “What’s going on? Who are you working for?”

“The DSO,” Helena said quickly.

“So you’re here to rescue us? I really wish you’d gotten here sooner, but,” he paused as the door to his cell swung open, “I shouldn’t complain.”

He was looking past her, at the B.O.W. as it raged and clawed at the bars.

Helena acted quickly, locking their two captives in the cell the BSAA agent had previously occupied.

“Hey, calm down,” the BSAA agent walked over to the cell, leaning against the glass when he got there. It looked like he was having a hard time walking, though Sherry couldn’t immediately tell why, “We’re going to get out of here.”

The B.O.W. moved to look past him, continuing to claw at the bars.

“Is that someone you knew?” Helena trailed off, watching as he tried and failed to get the B.O.W.’s attention.

“Yes,” the BSAA agent sighed heavily, “You mind opening the glass at least so I can talk to him? Once I get him to calm down we can let him out and then free the others, or at least everyone who’s safe to let out. Josh thinks he’s contagious and I’m not sure Ethan’s all there most of the time. I’m Parker Luciani by the way.”

Stepping back from the glass so Sherry could slide the keycard and punch in the code the woman had shown her, the man looked at her and smiled, holding out a shaking hand.

“I’m Sherry Birkin,” she introduced herself and went to take his hand in hers only to stop when she got a look at his eyes. They were watery and tinted pink with burst blood vessels.

Seeing her look of shock Parker smiled apologetically, “It’s a plaga, dominant form. Like I said, I can’t complain.”

Thinking of Leon Sherry nodded and finished keying in the code.

The glass slid aside and the B.O.W. let out a deafening roar.

Parker winced, but stood his ground, going so far as to reach out and rest a hand on the B.O.W.’s shoulder, “We’re going to get out of here.”

It growled and shrugged away from him.

He was undeterred, grabbing at its claws when it tried to push him away, “That’s Sherry and…”

“Helena Harper,” she introduced herself in a small voice, watching as Parker continued trying to reason with the thing.

It growled again, dropping back to drag a paw across its face. Pacing back and forth, it shook itself before pressing its face against the bars to look at them. Beneath heavy brows six eyes went wide, “Sherry? Helena?”

Though it spoke in a deep, animal growl, its words were surprisingly clear given the state it was in.

“You know them?” Parker sounded as shocked as the B.O.W. looked.

“Yes,” it stared at them, “They’re…I…”

It grimaced, grinding its teeth together and growling deep in its throat.

Sherry took a step back, but Parker was unafraid, if anything he seemed encouraged, grabbing the B.O.W.’s hand when it reached through the bars.

Through the bars…

It was shrinking, the layers of armor covering its back moving and sliding, just like what had happened with Simmons. One by one its eyes winked out of sight until only three remained, blank and yellow. The pincers on its back collapsed, folding in on themselves while its tail slowly shrank back into its body, twitching spasmodically as muscles condensed and repositioned themselves until all that remained was a short, curled length of bone and sinew. The change wasn’t perfect or even, one of its hands only had four fingers tipped with thick claws, patches of armor remained, its back was hunched from where the claws had been, and deep fissures crisscrossed its heavily muscled frame.

When it stood up…

He stood up, Sherry corrected herself, blushing and looking away, he was instantly recognizable despite the yellow eyes and crevasses running across his face.

It was Chris.

Seeing her embarrassment he lowered a hand and covered himself, “So you two are here to rescue us?”

“Yes,” not sure if she was doing the right thing Sherry let him out.

He walked past her and held an arm out for Parker.

The plaga infected agent grabbed on and leaned heavily against him.

“Thanks, I’m getting better but…” he trailed off with a shrug.

“What happened?” Helena interjected, “Is it something to do with the plaga?”

She sounded suspicious and Sherry couldn’t blame her for it.

Parker frowned, “It’s a long story, but things went wrong when they were testing things after the plaga matured.”

“At least you’re walking again,” Chris commented, walking him down the hall.

“The plaga’s doing it all,” Parker said flatly, “I can’t feel anything.”

They stopped in front of a cell containing a B.O.W. the likes of which Sherry had never seen before. The thing was tall enough that it couldn’t stand up straight, if she had to guess somewhere around nine feet, but it was skeletally thin, muscle stretched tightly over twisted bone. Minute, peeling scales bristled along its arms and shoulders and similar scales flaked off in patches from ragged, moth-like wings.

It gave them a thumbs up and motioned for them to continue onward.

“That’s Josh,” Chris explained, as though that meant something.

“Shouldn’t we at least open the glass wall so he can talk?” Sherry asked, stopping by the locking mechanism.

“No!” Chris growled, the fissures along his face and back opening wider, “He’s too dangerous.”

Sherry stared at Josh. He didn’t seem any more dangerous than any of the others, but he was motioning frantically for them to keep going.

Chris’ growl deepened when they reached the next cell, the crevasses along his face spreading as another eye opened and his mouth stretched back farther than it should have.

“Hey, calm down,” Parker tightened his grip on Chris’ arm, “You said you know him.”

“I do,” Chris snapped, “Doesn’t mean I like the bastard.”

Standing in middle of the cell, staring coolly at Chris, was Jake.

Sherry rushed to open the door, her hands shaking so badly that it took her three tries to key in the correct code.

“Hey supergirl, what took you so long?” Jake laughed, stepping out of the cell.

“Jake!” she ran forward to throw her arms around his neck. He was more muscular than she remembered, taller maybe, but it had been a long time since she’d seen him in person, “You’re alight!”

“Mostly,” his laughter took on a bitter note as he put an arm around her, “But I won’t say that I’m not glad to see you.”

Something twitched and squirmed beneath her hands. Sherry looked up and saw that his eyes weren’t brown anymore, they were red, not bloodshot like Parker’s, but deep crimson and there was something wrong with his pupils, they’d narrowed to slits, but their edges were irregular, shifting.

He’d been infected with something, but what?

Almost as if he was reading her mind Chris let out a harsh growl, “Uroboros.”

Sherry turned to look at him, his form had continued to shift, leaving him somewhere halfway between human and the form he’d been in when they’d first arrived.

“Yeah,” Jake spat angrily, “Don’t say anything.”

Chris snorted.

Uroboros.

Parker looked confused.

Sherry felt the squirming things wrap around her fingers, tentacles working their way up her wrist and arm.

Tentacles, twice in one day.

Unable to help herself she pulled away.

A flicker of hurt passed across Jake’s face, then it was gone and he shrugged, feigning indifference, “It’s not great, but I’m used to it.”

The mass of tentacles that had replaced his arm twitched and writhed against each other, lashing across the floor.

She nodded wordlessly, not sure if she trusted herself to say anything.

At least it wasn’t like things were going to get worse.

“Barry’s next,” Chris pointed at the last occupied cell on the opposite side of the hall.

Things got worse.

She knew who Barry was, or at least knew of him from Claire. He was a family friend of the Redfields and she’d always been curious about meeting him because of how highly Claire had spoken of him.

Right now she didn’t want to meet him.

The man in the cell was obviously infected by the G-virus. He looked nothing like her father had, but the similarities were there, eyes in random places, his asymmetrical appearance, an extra arm and those claws. It was too easy to imagine him reaching out and grabbing her the moment he was freed.

Grabbing her and…

A hand grabbed her arm.

A normal, human hand.

“Come on, let’s step back a bit, give them some room, okay?” Jake had figured out that there was something wrong and carefully guided her back to the door.

She kept her eyes focused on his hand, not the rest of him.

They went out into the stairwell where he helped her sit down. He remained standing, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, or really arm across his chest, holding onto the constantly moving mass of tentacles that was his other arm.

“Hits a little too close to home, huh?” he asked without making eye contact.

“Yeah,” she gave him a sickly smile. She hadn’t explained what had happened to her to him, afraid it would frighten him off, but they’d talked about things enough for him to know that she’d been infected against her will back when she was little.

Jake smiled back and continued, “You grew up in a place like this and it sucks to have to come back and find something like this.”

He gestured vaguely at nothing in particular with his hand while the tentacles twitched and writhed of their own accord.

It was like something out of one of her nightmares, but she didn’t want to explain that, that in her dreams she was the monster who had been locked away or that some of what she’d seen today was bringing back memories that she’d tried her hardest to forget.

“I don’t like tentacles,” she blurted out when she realized that he was waiting for her to say something.

Jake looked at her, blood-red eyes wide, his expression one of utter bafflement, “I don’t really like them either, but…Okay, you got me supergirl, I’ve got no clue what to say to that. I had this whole long thing about dealing with the past, moving on and getting the fuckers responsible for this and then something about how things’ll work out because they can’t lock all of us away and pretend we don’t exist, then you go and…”

He shook his head, his smile genuine.

“You can still give your speech,” she laughed despite herself.

“Nah,” Jake made a dismissive gesture, “I’m not one for speeches.”

Noise from the other side of the door let them know that the others were heading their way.

Chris was the first through the door, slamming it open hard enough to dent the metal. He’d continued to revert to the condition he’d been in when they first saw him, hunched over so that his hands were nearly touching the floor, claws just starting to emerge from his back. Parker was leaning heavily against him, struggling to keep up.

Sherry watched as the plaga infected agent closed his eyes, an expression of intense concentration on his face. Slender, multi-jointed appendages tipped with sharp claws emerged from beneath his sleeve and hooked onto the bit of armor on Chris’ shoulder that he was holding on to, the plaga helping to hold him in place.

Pushing past Jake and nearly knocking Sherry over, Chris stormed up the stairs, dropping to all fours as his body continued to warp and shift.

“If I find her she’s dead,” he growled.

“You can’t!” Barry hurried through the door after him, “She needs help. We’ll find Natalia, and let the DSO take her into custody, but I won’t let you hurt her. Wesker did this to her and – ”

Letting out a roar that was painfully loud in the confines of the stairwell Chris broke into an awkward jog, dragging Parker with him for several steps until the plaga retracted its limbs and he fell to the floor.

“Chris! Stay with us!”

But it was already too late, he had reached the landing and swatted the door open with his claws, tearing it free from its hinges.

Barry rushed after him, forcing Jake and Sherry to dive out of the way as he hurried up the stairs, shouting for Chris to stop.

“We have to stop him!” Helena dashed into the stairwell a moment later.

“Who?” Sherry wondered.

“Why?” Jake smirked.

“Chris is going to kill Natalia Korda if he gets to her first, we can’t let him do that.”

It took Sherry a moment to place the name, but when she did it didn’t make any sense. Natalia was Barry’s adopted daughter, but she couldn’t understand what she’d be doing here or why Chris would want to kill her unless he’d completely lost control.

“Again, why?” Jake sounded exasperated.

“She’s the one behind all this,” Parker commented, seeing Sherry’s look of confusion.

“Exactly,” Helena nodded, “And that’s why we need to capture her and take her into custody. If this isn’t the only facility of its kind, if she wasn’t acting alone…”

She let the thought hang.

“When you put it that way,” Jake sighed, “Alright, I’ll help.”

Parker struggled to his feet, leaning heavily against the stair rail.

As Sherry walked by him and saw something moving beneath his clothing she realized what he’d meant when he’d said that it was he plaga letting him walk. From the looks of things the mutant parasite was literally puppeteering his body.

Following Chris wasn’t all that difficult, it was just a matter of following the damage and the bodies. He’d been ripping doors off their hinges, killing anyone who got in his way. The carnage was no different than any other B.O.W. attack, no indication that there was anything left of the BSAA agent. She could hear Chris roaring up ahead and Barry shouting for him to stop.

Turning through a door that had been ripped off of its hinges the three of them were greeted by the sight of Chris slamming again and again into a vault style door, Parker having been left far behind. There were deep gouges in the walls to either side of the door, but the door itself was holding fast despite Chris’ repeated attempts to smash it down, alternating between hitting it with all four sets of claws and head-butting it.

Barry stood a few feet away, pleading for Chris to stop, to let him talk to her.

Sherry felt awful for thinking it, but seeing Barry in that state made the G-virus B.O.W. less terrifying.

Another charge from Chris and the door creaked and bowed on its hinges.

One more good hit and he’d break through.

Barry seemed to realize this because he tackled Chris, “I’m not letting you hurt her!”

Chris twisted in his grip, digging his main set of claws into Barry’s shoulders and his pincers into the mismatched set of arms on his right side. Shouting in alarm, Barry tried to shove him away with his left hand and was promptly bitten. Blood flew in all directions as the two of them rolled on the floor, Barry trying to free himself and pin Chris down while Chris seemed content to rip and tear and the G-virus mutated man.

Helena had her gun out, but lining up a clear shot would be impossible for all the good it would have done. They hadn’t come expecting B.O.W.s and neither of them was armed to deal with the situation.

“We have to do something,” Sherry pleaded, turning to Jake.

“I’m not getting between them, not when he’s like this,” Jake tilted his head towards Chris, “I’m not getting myself mauled just because Barry can’t stand the idea of the bitch who did this to us getting killed.”

“We’ll have to let them fight it out,” Helena agreed, “And take care of which ever one survives.”

Sherry couldn’t help but notice the ambiguity of her fellow agent’s statement, but it wasn’t something she could try to argue. Chris was faring far better in the fight, even though Barry had managed to rise to his feet and slam Chris down against the floor. Barry couldn’t or wouldn’t match Chris’ single minded aggression and was suffering to it.

“Chris!” Sherry screamed at the top of her lungs, “Stop!”

She waited and hoped, but the C-virus B.O.W. gave no sign of having heard her.

“He’s gone,” Helena said softly.

“Don’t say that!” Parker shouted, staggering onto the scene.

In the excitement Sherry had forgotten about the plaga infected agent entirely, but he had a plan, or so she hoped.

Walking fearlessly over to Chris he jammed his knuckles into either corner of Chris’ mouth in an attempt to force him to let go of Barry’s arm.

He did, immediately turning and sinking his teeth into Parker’s hand. Parker’s expression was one of shock rather than pain even when blood began to flow from between Chris’ fangs and the bones of his hand were crushed with a series of muffled pops. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that he couldn’t feel anything.

Six yellow eyes rolled in their sockets, moving to stare at Parker.

A massive pincer let go of Barry and slowly swung forward.

Parker grabbed the thinner bottom half with his free hand, “That’s right, let’s just get you out of here.”

Chris pushed away from Barry and allowed Parker to walk backwards down the hall, slowly guiding him away.

“We’ll go sit outside for a while, calm down and then we can figure things out.”

Chris nodded, still holding on to Parker’s hand with his mouth.

When Parker tripped and fell, sprawling forward and landing on Chris’ head it could have been a disaster, but Chris simply stood there, waiting for Parker to regain his footing the pair continued their awkward exit.

It was painful to watch, even for Sherry because she knew what that kind of injury was like, how bad broken bones hurt, and unlike her, it would take Parker a long time to recover. How long she didn’t know. She didn’t think that plagas did much to heal their hosts, just make them more resistant to pain.

Barry on the other hand was already recovering by the time the pair was out of sight.

Rising carefully to his feet he looked at his arms and chest, where he’d been bitten and clawed. The injuries had already stopped bleeding and were well on their way to being healed.

“It’s the G-virus,” Sherry explained, knowing far more about it than she would have liked, “Anyone infected with it heals pretty quickly and is nearly impossible to kill, especially someone in the shape you’re in.”

To her amazement Barry smiled, “I guess I should be glad for that much at least. She said she did it because she was afraid that I’d die.”

“I wasn’t,” the door had opened slightly and a small, dark-haired young woman was peering out, “I didn’t want you to die, or Kathy, Polly or Moira. I don’t want anyone to die.”

She stared at Jake, her face a mask of fury as she said the last part.

“Listen,” Jake snapped, “I have no idea who the hell you are, but –”

“And I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive you for that,” she said quietly as she stepped out in to the hall, “Even living forever I might not be able to, but I’ll try and in time maybe. Forever is a long time to stay angry. That’s the beauty of it.”

“Natalia,” Barry’s voice was little more than a whisper as he walked over and knelt down to look her in the eye, “Why?”

“I told you, I did it to save you, to save everyone,” she crossed her arms over her chest, looking very much like a pouting teenager, though Sherry knew first hand that appearances could be deceiving, “Saving humanity from death is just the start of it though. Immortality means that people will have to look at things long term, to actually think of the impact of their actions because they’ll be around for the results. Not having to fear death, people will be free for the first time in history. I know I won’t be loved for it, not for a long time, but once the world’s changed, once everyone’s had the time they need, they’ll understand. They’ll thank me for it.”

Jake made a dismissive noise, earning him a glare from Natalia.

“You of all people should understand,” she snapped, “Your mother was human and what happened to her?”

“My old man didn’t do much better, did he?” Jake laughed bitterly.

“Don’t you dare talk about Albert like that! He was a genius!” Natalia all but screamed, “What Spencer did to him, did to all of us has no bearing on that. You can’t begin to imagine how we suffered, all because one old, wretched man was so terrified of death that he made us who we were and then thought he might claim our birthright.”

“Listen here,” Jake took a step forward, red eyes narrowed to slits, tentacles writhing in agitation.

“Kids!” Barry stood up to his full height, head nearly touching the ceiling, “Stop fighting!”

Amazingly Jake fell silent and actually took a step back.

Sherry had to choke back a fit of entirely inappropriate giggles that was threatening to burst out of her.

Natalia continued, her tone and demeanor subdued, “Please Barry, don’t be mad. You gave me so much that I never had, never imagined having, I just wanted to repay you. I can still make it right though. We’ll get Kathy and the others, bring them here and infect them with the G-virus too. That way you won’t have to worry about hurting them or anything happening to them. They’ll all be safe, forever. Barry, you have to understand, you are, were, old, even if they hadn’t accidentally nearly killed you there was no telling how much longer you would have had and I didn’t want you to die. There’s more to it though, think about all the years you and Moira lost angry at each other, years you won’t be able to make up for because there isn’t enough time for her the way she is now. Imagine what it would have been like if what happened to Polly was something you all could have laughed off because in a few days at most, more likely hours, she would have been fine and back to playing with her sister. That’s what I want Barry. I want people to be happy, to be safe.”

Her words came out in a rush, faster and faster.

Barry dropped back to his knees, put his arms around her in an awkward hug, “You’ve been through a lot, so much that I’ll never understand, but I’m here for you now.”

“I know, but before you might have died and then you wouldn’t be,” she threw her arms around him, sobbing, “You can’t understand, ever. I just want you safe. I don’t want you dying like my parents or like Albert. I don’t want you to leave me alone like everyone else did. I want…I want…I don’t know what I want!”

Her whole body shook as she cried into Barry’s arms, the mutated man holding her and patting her on the back.

“It’s going to be okay, everything’s going to be fine,” he spoke softly to her.

“Don’t tell me you’re buying any of that,” Jake spoke quietly to her.

“What?” Sherry stared at him, “I don’t –”

Jake raised an eyebrow, “You’re crying.”

Until he’d said it she hadn’t realized that she was.

“I’m sorry,” she wiped her eyes with her arm, “I was just thinking about my own dad, what happened to him.”

“And how does that,” Jake looked over at Barry and Natalia, “Have anything to do with…”

“Just that if only my dad had ended up like Barry instead of…” Sherry trailed off helplessly.

Jake looked at her warily, “You’re really good at making me want to ask questions that I know I won’t want to know the answers to.”

She couldn’t help smiling despite herself.

“Okay,” Helena said cautiously, “I hope you two don’t mind me going to contact the DSO. My radio’s not working, but there has to be a phone or something around here that will work. You’ve got things under control, right?”

Sherry looked at Natalia and Barry, and then at Jake, “As under control as possible given…”

 


	10. Aftermath

Helena had been impressed by the speed with which the DSO responded, having agents there within the hour to pick Natalia up and take her in for questioning. Even more impressive was the fact that the pickup was without incident given that Barry wasn’t very happy about the way things were handled and Helena hadn’t done an adequate job of warning them what the situation was. She’d told them that there were several infected but lucid individuals on the premises, but she’d neglected to clarify that said individuals were B.O.W.s. Fortunately by the time they arrived Parker had Chris safely back down in the cells to update Josh on what had happened and Leon had the good sense to keep his head down and stay out of sight. Barry being there had made things tense for a few moments, but Natalia of all people had taken control of the situation, stating that the terms of her surrender were that no one in the building be hurt. After that she and Sherry had one hell of a report to make and when it was over they were put in charge of overseeing the cleanup by virtue of the fact that between the two of them they had at least some acquaintance with several of the infected individuals.

The first thing they’d done was get to the control room of the building and figure out how to raise the water level in the concrete lined pit where Leon was being kept. Being able to swim made things more bearable for him, or so he said, and being able to get to ground level without having to climb the walls was a definite plus. After that it was a lot of hurry up and wait as well as a great deal of politicking as the BSAA sent in its own team to deal with its agents.

In the end the BSAA was given custody of Josh, Parker and Chris, though the logistics of transporting them was a whole new ordeal. Chris hadn’t changed back to his more human form and was refusing to leave until Josh was able to be moved and Parker couldn’t be taken away for medical attention, despite his injured hand, because that would mean leaving Chris unsupervised and he wasn’t exactly trustworthy. Helena had watched as Chris tried to take charge of things despite his condition and end up backing a newly arrived human BSAA agent into a corner for what he’d decided was sloppy handling of the situation. That no one had been shot or mauled was a small miracle.

Josh’s situation was a difficult one. Mentally he was completely in control, the problem was his biology. The scales and hairs he was constantly shedding carried some variant of the T-virus, not one normally capable of harming a healthy individual, but they were also highly toxic and if inhaled would cause severe, fatal anaphylactic shock, after which the victim would reanimate as a zombie, as was seen on security footage from his initial infection and the escape attempt followed. It was a process he had no control over and it meant that anyone interacting with him had to do so in full biosafety gear. There would be no getting him out unless there was a way to contain him and due to his size and wings it was impossible to simply put him in a biosafety suit. The BSAA was fabricating some form of transportable containment cell, but until then it had been determined that he would have to be kept in the cell he was in.

Parker was constantly at Chris’ side, distracting him, keeping him out of the way of the other agents, but between his own condition and the plaga it was wearing on him. His injured hand had been bandaged and seemed fine until you looked closely at it or saw what was underneath the bandages. Helena had and it wasn’t pleasant. The bone and tissue damage from Chris’ bite had been severe and the delay before he received treatment meant that the damage that had been done was irreversible. The fact that he could use that hand at all had nothing to do with regeneration or recovery, instead the plaga had replaced the injured limb entirely. Beneath the bandages was a roughly hand shaped mass of claws and segmented tendrils. For Chris’ sake he was pretending it didn’t bother him, but Helena could tell he needed a break.

Fortunately she and Sherry had been able to call in some favors from the DSO and arrange for someone to come and relieve Parker and technically, since that individual had been forced to retire for medical reasons they hadn’t even needed to make the request through the BSAA. Jill Valentine, who had responded to the request with an affirmative, had been brought on as an expert civilian consultant working for the DSO.

If it had upset anyone in the BSAA they had wisely held their tongues.

Jill’s coming was something had been kept quiet until she was actually there. Chris had been taken to the opposite end of the building when she arrived and she was rushed to a lab that had been hastily cleared out for use as a meeting room to be informed of Chris’ condition. To her credit she hadn’t flinched, even when shown live security feed of Parker leading him around, she’d simply asked how soon she’d be able to see him.

The white haired woman’s carefully guarded tone had unnerved Helena, got her worrying about how Jill would handle the reunion, but she forced her concerns aside and called Parker to bring Chris up to the room, not mentioning the reason why. Surprising Chris might not have been a good thing, but the last thing she needed was for him to lose control in the halls. In the lab there was a chance of confining him, tranquilizing him if necessary, though she had no idea what the effective dose would be for a B.O.W. of his nature and the two lab workers they’d managed to capture were only slightly better than useless.

Chris shuffled slowly through the door, inhaled sharply and then froze, all six eyes locked on Jill.

Parker looked at Jill and then at Chris, “Should I go?”

The B.O.W. nodded.

Helena watched as Chris walked across the room, armor and extra limbs sliding and shifting, eyes closing, his weight redistributing itself so that he was able to walk upright. By the time he reached Jill he was completely human looking aside from the angry red lines crisscrossing his body and his solid yellow eyes.

He fell into Jill’s arms, sobbing brokenly and Jill slowly guided him down to the floor.

Kneeling, arms around Chris, Jill turned to look at her, “You can go too.”

Helena didn’t even attempt to protest.

After that Parker was free and thankful, choosing to spend most of his in a darkened room, carefully working with the plaga to build up his strength and try and improve his balance and mobility. It was going to be hard for him, Helena had learned what had happened to him and considering that the plaga hadn’t been able to fix his hand she doubted that it would be able to do much more than it already had for his severed spinal cord. Things might get better for him as the plaga continued to grow, but that would only be because the plaga would continue to integrate itself into his body.

Chris’ recovery was remarkable, no sign of physical regression to his monstrous form, though Jill being at his side constantly, holding his hand and talking quietly to him likely had something to do with that.

Impulse control was still an issue for him though. His mood might have improved drastically, especially when the containment unit for Josh finally arrived, but Chris was still wildly unpredictable. In the middle of a conversation with Jill about what they’d do once things were taken care of he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him.

Helena couldn’t believe it when the Jill said yes, her exact words being, “Finally” and “Of course”.

It wasn’t terribly romantic, but Helena realized that she didn’t know what the two of them had been through, just that they’d been together since Raccoon City.

With Josh safely on his way to some BSAA run lab, Chris and Parker were free to go as well, to the same lab, which was going to be interesting since Parker, after hearing about Chris and Jill, had already announced that he was going to be Chris’ best man and plan the bachelor party. Helena wasn’t sure if he was joking or not and the thought was horrifying, especially since neither Chris of Jill commented either way on what he was saying. Jake wasn’t invited, but Sherry could either be a bride’s maid or the flower girl, depending on what Claire wanted to do.

Helena had asked Sherry if she though they were serious and her response had been to shrug and say that she wasn’t sure.

Barry, by virtue of his unique situation in the incident, had managed to request a reunion with his family which was very cautiously arranged. Though he hadn’t had any control issues, his fight with Chris being used as an example of that, he’d agreed to be kept in a cell while his family visited him, just to be safe.

He knew what the G-virus did to people, but was desperate to see his wife and daughters. They’d been equally determined to see him, harassing the DSO with constant phone calls and increasingly vitriolic emails from Moira.

His wife, Kathy was the first to enter the basement cellblock, and they’d had a long conversation, which Helena had observed over the security feed, audio turned off to give them privacy and a team of BSAA agents waiting in the stairwell, ready to act at the first sign of trouble.

Trouble came from an unexpected direction, upstairs, when Moira grew impatient with waiting and stormed out of the room where she and Polly were and headed downstairs. She then managed to shout her way past the BSAA agents and into the cellblock.

Even without audio Helena was good enough at reading lips to guess that Barry’s response to her arrival had been to scold her for her language. Having been on the receiving end of one of Moira’s tirades and been dubbed ‘the cunt-waffle in charge’ Helena figured that it was futile.

 

All their fears had been unfounded because Barry had no difficulty with the reunion and Polly was brought down as well, overjoyed to be with her father again even if she wasn’t able to bring herself look at him.

Helena couldn’t imagine what the family was going through given that their adopted daughter had been the one behind it all and was in the process of recounting a positively horrific tale of eugenics and human experimentation spanning longer than she’d been alive. Helena had only heard bits and pieces, but what she had heard was terrifying. Because of the nature of what Natalia was talking about it was unlikely that there’d ever be an actual trial out of fear of what she might reveal, so at least the Burtons would be spared that.

Because Sherry had been spending most of her time with Jake, Helena had been handling things mostly on her own, which wasn’t a bad thing since it meant that Sherry was the one dealing with Jake. His attitude hadn’t been improved by his infection with Uroboros and he was outraged at the idea of being taken into custody by the DSO, especially after all he’d done for them, giving his blood away for next to nothing so that they could make vaccines. His opinion was that the least they could do was let him go. Sherry had been the one brave enough to ask where and the answer hadn’t been a pleasant one. He was figuring that given a few months he’d be fine to go back to work as a contractor, he just needed to figure out who was willing to employ B.O.W.s.

Sherry was working on talking him down from that stance, but it was taking a great deal of effort because neither she nor Helena had an answer about what would happen to him. He was useless for vaccines and they couldn’t let him walk free. At the same time he wasn’t an American citizen and hadn’t done anything wrong other than being a B.O.W. His threat that he’d contact the Edonian Embassy if they didn’t agree to let him go was likely empty since Helena wasn’t sure if he was a registered citizen of that country either, but it was a fiasco that she wanted no part of. After what the FBC had done pretty much every human rights and counter terror organization in Europe was treating the United States with suspicion and the last thing the DSO needed was reports of holding an Edonian citizen captive when his only crime was being infected with a mutagenic virus by someone who was a naturalized American.

It was a political fiasco that was thankfully above her paygrade and one that Sherry was working diligently to avert.

The one infected that she didn’t know much about, Ethan, a man who had seemed half out of his mind when she’d first encountered him, was improving thanks to careful medication. He was lucid most of the time, able to recognize that he was in control of the mutated half of his body and had started asking after Mia, his wife.

That had been hard for her since she’d been ordered to be especially careful with him. Apparently Ethan, or at least what he was infected with was part of an ongoing investigation and as soon as it was feasible he’d be transferred to a different facility for holding. Between what Ethan had told her and what her employers wouldn’t she’d come to the conclusion that Mia had been directly responsible for Ethan’s infection and that she might end up taking the fall for whatever company had manufactured the virus in the first place. Given Ethan’s tentative grip on sanity it was best to give him as little information as possible. He didn’t like it, but accepted it with quiet resignation.

Which left Leon to worry about and there was surprisingly little concern there. He insisted that he was fine now that he had room to move and a laptop computer so he could pass the time and the DSO had immediately set to work figuring out what to do with him.

They’d found a marine research facility that was willing to transport him to wherever he needed to go, as long as the DSO paid for it. The problem was, there was no place to take him to, at least not until the research facility received a massive anonymous donation that came with the suggestion that they might want it to build a new facility on an island that had been set aside as a wildlife preserve. The facility didn’t own the land at the time the donation went through, the U.S. government did, but through the DSO they received permission to start building.

It was a remarkable turn of good fortune, an almost suspicious coincidence and Helena had gone out to ask him what he thought had happened.

Leon smiled, typed something on his laptop and turned it so she could see the screen.

“Ada.”

She didn’t understand the history between Leon and the spy, but he was convinced the money had come from her. When she pressed him for a reason why he simply shrugged and typed a bit more.

“Reasons and the place it’s being built fits with her. Maybe she’ll come by and visit.”

Leon then dunked himself under the water and turned to stare out into the distance.

If it was something that he looked forward to, something that gave him hope, Helena wasn’t going to try and make sense of it.

She sat with him, watching the vast, empty desert all around them and Leon enjoyed her silent company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! I hope those of you that read this enjoyed it. As always, I like to try and take requests even if I can't promise that I'll fulfill them. Trades and similar exchanges are more likely to get me writing, but any idea that interests me has the potential to mutate into something.


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